Full text of "University Record: Memorial Number"

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2011 with funding from

CARL!: Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois

http://www.archive.org/details/universityrecordOOuniv

THE

University Record

William 3aalnep Harper

MEMORIAL NUMBER
March, 1906

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND NEW YORK

THE UNIVERSITY RECORD

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

MEMORIAL NUMBER, MARCH, 1906

CONTENTS

Frontispiece: William Rainey Harper, President of the University

Memorial Addresses at the Funeral of William Rainey Harper:

By William H. P. Faunce, President of Brown University -------- 5

By E. Benjamin Andrews, Chancellor of the University of Nebraska ------ g

By Harry Pratt Judson, Dean of the Faculties of Arts, Literature, and Science - - - - 11

Resolutions in Memory of the President of the University:

By the University Board of Trustees ---------.--15

By the University Senate Representing the Faculties .--- -- ---15

By the University Congregation -------------18

By the Board of Trustees of the Divinity School ---------- ig

Memorial Address at Harvard University, by Joseph Henry Beale, Jr., Professor of Law - - - 20

Memorial Addresses at Columbia University:

By Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University -------22

By Charles Cuthbert Hall, President of Union Theological Seminary ------ 22

Poem (with Portrait of President Harper), by Andrew Fleming West, Dean of the Graduate

School, Princeton University- ------..----24

Memorial Addresses:

At the University of Illinois, by President Edmund J. James 25

At Denison University, by Richard Steere Colwell, Professor of Greek ------ 30

At John B. Stetson University, by President Lincoln Hulley -------- 32

Addresses at the Memorial Meeting of the Student Body:

By Harry Pratt Judson, Dean of the Faculties of Arts, Literature, and Science - - - - 36

By Eri Baker Hulbert, Dean of the Divinity School --------- 37

By Charles Andrews Huston, Representing the Law School --------38

By Arthur Eugene Bestor, on Behalf of the Alumni and Graduate Schools 38

By George Raymond Schaeffer, on Behalf of the Senior Colleges 40

By John Fryer Moulds, on Behalf of the Junior Colleges 41

By Edith Baldwin Terry, on Behalf of the Women of the University - 41

Memorial Exercises of the Alumni Association:

A Letter from President Harper to the Secretary of the Alumni Association of the Old University of

Chicago 43

The President and the Students of the University, by William Scott Bond 43

Dr. Harper in the Early Days of the University, by James Primrose Whyte 44

Dr. Harper: His Life a Message to Us, by Maude Torrence Clendening 46

2 UNIVERSITY RECORD

President Harper's Relation to Education, by Florence Holbrook -----..47
Dr. Harper as a Teacher, by Theodore Gerald Soares, Professor of Homiletics - - - - 49
Resolutions in Memory of President Harper -----.....51

President William R. Harper (Portrait) - - ,- 5

President Harper and His Life Work, by John Huston Finley, President of the College of the City of

New York -----------------52

Personal Recollections of Dr. Harper, by Frank Knight Sanders, formerly Dean of the Yale Divinity

School .----.-----..-...56

The Late President Harper, by George Adam Smith, Professor of Hebrew in the United Free Church

College, Glasgow, Scotland --------------58

William Rainey Harper, An Editorial in the Outlook, by Lyman Abbott ------ 60

The Death of William R. Harper, Reprinted from the Springfield Republican ----- 63

William Rainey Harper, The Man, by Albion Woodbury Small, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts

and Literature -------------...55

William Rainey Harper: An Appreciation, by Shailer Mathews, Professor of Systematic Theology - 70

The Personal Religion of William Rainey Harper, by Ernest DeWitt Burton, Head of the Department

of New Testament Literature and Interpretation --.--.-... 74

William Rainey Harper, Biographical, by Francis Wayland Shepardson, Dean of the Senior Colleges - 78

President Harper as an Administrator, by Nathaniel Butler, Dean of the College of Education - - 82
President Harper as the Christian Scholar, by John Merlin Powis Smith, of the Department of Semitic

Languages and Literatures ---.----------85

Communications for the Editor should be addressed to the Recorder of the University of Chicago, Chicago, lUinoia.

Business Correspondence should be addressed to the University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois.

Subscription, Si. 00 a year; single copies, 25 cents. Postage prepaid by publishers for all subscriptions in the
United States, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Porto Rico, Panama Canal Zone, Republic of Panama, Hawaiian Islands, Philip-
pine Islands, Guam, Tutuila (Samoa), Shanghai. For all other countries in the Postal Union, 25 cents for postage should
be added to the subscription price. Remittances should be made payable to the University of Chicago Press and should be
in Chicago or New York exchange, postal or express order. If local check is used, 15 cents must be added for collection.

Claims for missing numbers should be filed on or before thirty days after the date of publication.

WILLIAM KALXEV HARI'ER
President of the University, 1S91-1906

MEMORIAL NUMBER

University Record

MARCH, 1906

MEMORIAL ADDRESSES AT THE FUNERAL OF WILLIAM RAINEY HARPER, PRESIDENT

OF THE UNIVERSITY'

said
man

ADDRESS

BY WILLIAM H. P. FAUNCE

President of Brown Uniuerslty

"Your young men shall see visions,
the Hebrew prophet. Because one youn
began to see visions some thirty years ago,
and was true to what he saw, we are here today
and the University is here for centuries to
come.

A great personality, like a great mountain,
is many-sided. Those who dwell on different
sides of the mountain all alike see it looming
large against the sky; but they see different
outlines, form various impressions, and their
reports must vary. A rarely gifted soul, a
bom leader of men, can be understood
only when all reports are united, and his serv-
ices to the nation and to the world can be
evaluated only when seen through the long
perspective of many years. Leaving to others,
or to the future, the estimate of our departed
leader's place in history, we may occupy these
moments simply with the utterance of affection
and gratitude.

No one could know William Rainey Harper
without admiring the rare simplicity of his

^ These addresses were given on the afternoon of
Sunday, January 14, 1906, in the Leon Mandel As-
sembly Hail.

spirit. He had something of the simple stur-
diness of the Old Testament heroes that he
loved so well. This simplicity appeared in his
manner: he was always approachable, genial,
unaffected as a child. It appeared in his
speech, whether public or private, and in all his
writings. He never attempted any special
force or brilliancy of style. Oratory was to
him impossible. The striking phrase or para-
graph was never an object in itself. He spoke
lucidly, solidly, forthrightly, and the simple
language of the fireside was the language in
which he addressed listening thousands.

This native simplicity was seen in his philos-
ophy and religion. His mind was distinctly
concrete and non-metaphysical. He declined
to dwell in the clouds of philosophic discussion.
A companion all his life of metaphysicians and
theologians, he propounded no philosophic the-
ory and defended no dogmatic system. His re-
ligious faith was not the outcome of logic,
it was the product of instinct and wide experi-
ence. His conduct of worship in the home
or the church was marked by a naivete and
childlike sincerity that was touching and con-
vincing. He approached the infinite, not by
the pathway of speculation or sacrament, but
as confidently and simply as a child reaches out
to a father.

VNIVERSIl Y RECORD

More clearly than anywhere else was this
simpHcity seen in his home. He was the com-
rade of his family and the best friend of his
own children. We may not lift the veil of do-
mestic privacy. Yet how many times he lifted
it to welcome distinguished scholars, authors,
statesmen, from all parts of the world ! Each
of these in turn discovered in that family cir-
cle, bound fast in mutual service, one source
of our leader's power, and each was greeted
with an unaffected friendship which grappled
the visitor as with hooks of steel.

Out of this simplicity of character sprang
a marvelous complexity of enterprise and or-
ganization. The immense variety of his under-
takings bewildered or dazzled those who could
not perceive that these were all branchings from
the single stem of one great purpose. It was
an inner passion for unity which led him to
undertake so many tasks and formulate so
elaborate plans. The wheels within wheels really
formed a closely articulated mechanism for
conveying a single purpose and ideal over a
vast extent of territory and through many sec-
tions of society. He could not endure loose
ends in thought or action. He would not trust
his ideas to the long result of time, or the slow
processes of evolution. He was not content,
in Milton's phrase, to "let truth and error
grapple," and hope that in some future age the
truth might win by its own inherent strength.
He must embody that truth in some immediate
visible organization, must give it hands and
feet, and construct for it a pathway into all
the ends of the earth. He was instinct with
the spirit of the crusader. But his crusade
against the powers of darkness was no planless
outburst of zeal. The hosts were marshaled,
captained, provisioned ; with tireless vigilance
each station in the journey was determined, and
the end crowned the work.

No man of our generation was more greatly
dowered with the constructive imagination.

The same power has enabled others to con-
struct mentally cathedrals, bridges, tunnels, or
great industrial enterprises ; the power, which
in others gave birth to ideal creations in art,
philosophy, or literature, in his mind blossomed
into far-reaching schemes for the education
of the people. On a certain porch by the shore
of an inland lake he sat day after day for many
successive summers, and in silence dreamed
out his plans for this University. Indeed, he
was always dreaming, and his spirit was far in
advance of any associate. I have seen him
summon a stenographer and in a single hour
plan a new institution of learning, with all offi-
cers and departments, down to the minutest
detail, doing this partly as a recreation from
more difficult tasks. I have seen him stand by
a sand-heap and paint in vivid sentences the
building that was to rise, and the work to be
done there a century hence. In these visions
he united the imagination of the artist with
the faith of the Christian. He carried with him
daily the substance of things hoped for, the
evidence of things not seen.

Men have said that he had extraordinary
resources at his own command and therefore
accomplished extraordinary results. In truth,
he had no resources until he had proved to the
world that he could wisely use them. When
he organized thousands of students throughout
the country for the study of a subject that was
esteemed the driest and dullest of all disci-
plines, he had no resources whatever. When
he was professor at Denison and Morgan Park,
he was almost destitute of resource. When
he came to Chicago, he had no assurances but
such as might be withdrawn at any time if he
failed to evince a mastery of the situation.
Through his whole life this man "went out not
knowing whither he went." If others placed
in later years large means at his disposal, the
question remains, why they gave it to him and
not to others. All over the land were institu-

UNIVERSITY RECORD

tions calling for support — why was it granted
here rather than elsewhere? Because the man
was here, and not elsewhere. "Institutions are
but the shadows of men." Wealth alone is pow-
erless to establish a seat of learning. It can
no more create a university than it can create
a human being. We may put millions into a
treasury and the heart of youth still be un-
stirred, the voice of scholarship still be
silent, and the fountains of inspiration still be
sealed. But when the man comes who can take
our gold and by his insight, foresight, and
energy transmute it into the fellowship of
scholars, into the eager pursuit of truth
whether it lead to joy or pain, into undying
allegiance to the ideal and the eternal, then
waiting wealth follows the man as the tides
unswervingly follow the moon.

But President Harper had more than imag-
ination and faith — he had a tenacious and in-
domitable will. His entire being tingled with
vitality, and his will was simply immense vital-
ity in action. His vast power to originate
sprang from a wealth of passion, for the pas-
sions are the driving wheels of the spirit. He
was no ascetic or recluse, but took a frank,
undisguised enjoyment in the good things of
Hfe. Always he felt delight in sound, and
therefore studied music ; delight in color, and
gave it expression at all academic functions ;
delight in festivals and pageants and paintings
and sculpture. It was his principles, not his
tastes, that made him a staunch advocate of
democracy. A man of warm red blood, he car-
ried within a store of intense feeling which
made his will inflexible. In the glow of his
own nature he fused the most diverse elements
of the constituency around him. In his tre-
mendous purpose were included men of all po-
litical parties, all sects and creeds and classes.
He instinctively divined the strength and weak-
ness of the men he knew. To their weakness
he offered support, to their strength he offered

a sphere of action, and the world, amazed,
saw men who could agree in nothing else,
agree in upholding the educational enterprise
of this leader unprecedented and unsurpassed.

But let us not forget today — for he would
have us remember it — that his great ambition
was not to be an administrator or executive,
but to be a teacher. Administrative duties
were thrust upon him and he could not escape.
The love of teaching was inborn and he could
not lose it. On his sick-bed he reached out a
feeble hand and holding up his book on the
Minor Prophets, just from the press, he cried:
"I would rather have produced that than be
president for forty years!" It was the voice
of the scholar refusing to be silenced by the
babel of administrative cares. With what sink-
ing of heart he turned from the comparative
leisure of the professor's chair to assume the
burden of the presidency none can know save
those who fifteen years ago stood by his side.
Plato in his Republic says that in the ideal state
the magistrate will be chosen from among' those
who are unwilling to govern. Surely in this
respect, also, Dr. Harper was amply qualified.
More than once we have seen him plunged in
uttermost dejection as he felt that he was sac-
rificing his career as a scholar to the desultory,
vexatious demands of an office. More than
once he has been tempted to drop the burden
and resume the work in which he delighted.
In recent years he felt a growing sense of isola-
tion, and became increasingly sensitive to the
misconstruction which always surrounds men
of originality and achievement. But his con-
science and his religion held him to his mighty
task. Are not our greatest warriors those who
hate war? The fact that President Harper
hated official routine, and longed to resume
that simple personal relation of teacher and
student, gave to his administration peculiar
power.

But a still deeper element in his power was

UNIVERSITY RECORD

his absolute unselfishness. Not a particle of
vanity could his closest friend detect. All the
honors heaped upon him, all swift shining suc-
cess, all the national and international fame,
did not for an instant affect his modesty of
bearing and genuine humility o\ spirit. His
life was wholly vicarious, freely spent for hu-
manity. If he demanded much of those around
him, he demanded more of himself. If he was
insistent and aggressive, and obliged at times
to inflict pain, it pained him more than any
other, and was always in the service of a great
and distant end. This conviction of his abso-
lute unselfishness drew his colleagues to him
in strongest bonds. While he must always be
the fountain of authority, he never treated his
lieutenants as employees. He insisted that
scholars should have time for research, for
travel, for production, and his conduct of this
University has lifted the station of the
university professor in America.

Of his amazing power to toil I can tell you
nothing, for you have seen it daily. He rec-
ognized clearly that it was not his function
to give to the University repose of spirit, but
to give it impulsion and vitality. His dynamic
quality was unique in the history of education.
Like the radio-active substances that give off
their particles in perpetual showers, yet sufifer
no apparent loss of energy, he steadily radiated
sympathy, inspiration, suggestion. He set in
movement thousands of sluggish souls who will
forever live an intenser, richer, more productive
life because their minds were touched by his.

Fortunate, indeed, it was that in this west-
ern metropolis the man and the opportunity
met. In the cooler and more cautious atmos-
phere of the East his work as innovator and
renovator would have been impossible. By re-
maining in New England he would have done
more for Hebrew and less for the world. His
power of daring and initiative could find sphere
only in some plastic environment, still young,

and eager to hear or tell some new thing. His
break with the past could not have been made
in any ancient university. Here in a city whose
stalwart genius was akin to his own, whose
vast undertakings reflected his own radiant
spirit, he found a -nov cttw from which he could
move the world. Here in the hopeful, hospita-
ble West, in the magnificent gifts of the
far-seeing founder, and the great gifts and
loyal aid of many citizens, he found the ma-
terials to incarnate his vast design. Men of
Chicago ! Let not his work perish ! Let it
not for a moment falter! You are honored in
having among you what may become the great-
est seat of learning in the modern world.

When in mid-career, at the zenith of his
fame and strength, he was smitten with mortal
pain, he began a work more spiritual in quality,
and so more lasting in result, than any done
before. For the last twelve months he has won
the admiration and possessed the sympathy of
all who ever heard his name. Calm, unterri-
fied, diligent, he has walked forward with slow-
er step toward the iron gate that was to swing
inward to the world of light. Men who have
long differed from him in policy have come
close to him to whisper their friendship and
gratitude. They have realized that the finest
heroism is not shown in some sudden charge
at the cannon's mouth, but in a twelve-months'
march through the valley of the shadow of
death by one who even then feared no evil.
The great University, composed of students
from every nation under heaven, of teachers
trained in many diverse fields, of strong and
differing personalities, suddenly drew togeth-
er, the touch of nature made all kin, and the
leader who brought them physically near by
his strength made them spiritually one by his
weakness and pain.

And since he believed so unhesitatingly in
immortality, since each day grew clearer his
faith that somehow, somewhere his work was

UNIVERSITY RECORD

to continue, shall we not make that faith our
own ? Quietly he said : "I feel less hesita-
tion in advancing into the unseen than I had
in accepting the presidency." His life is not
to be understood apart from that basal convic-
tion. For myself, without reference to the
faith of the fathers, I find it wholly incredible
that that titanic strength which changed for
some of us our horizon and our career, has
vanished from the universe. Taught as we
have been from our youth to believe in the in-
destructibility of force, in the conservation of
energy, surely, to believe that the end of all
service has come to our dead leader would be
as great an affront to our intelligence as a
mockery to our heart. We dare with John
Fiske to affirm that belief in the hereafter
which is simply "an act of faith in the reason-
ableness of God's work." Dr. Harper's last
service was to make immortality more credible.

Therefore in some far-shining sphere,
Conscious, or not, of the past,
Still thou performest the word
Of the spirit in which thou dost live.
Prompt, unwearied as here.
Still like a trumpet dost rouse
Those who with half-opened eye
Tread the border-land dim
'Twixt vice and virtue; reviv'st.
Succour' St; this was thy work.
This was thy life upon earth.

ADDRESS

BY E. BENJAMIN ANDREWS
Chancellor of the University of Nebraska

If there was any fitness in the request that
I should be one of the speakers at these ob-
sequies, it lay in the circumstance that at three
important moments in the life of our departed
leader it was my privilege to stand as near to
him as any man stood.

One of these was when, in his very young
manhood, he faced the question of questions
that cjDmes to every ingenuous spirit, whether

to try and live for himself or guide his life
with a view to the divine will and the world's
good. Mr. Harper settled that issue in a noble
way. He accepted joyfully the law of service
to God and man, with the creed naturally ac-
companying — Christ, the church, the primacy of
the spiritual, and the endurance of our imma-
terial part after bodily death. From that creed
he never swerved in any iota. His thought
on immortality in his last days was but a more
intense form of reflection to which he had al-
ways been accustomed.

Another decisive moment in Mr. Harper's
life occurred when he was forced to ask wheth-
er he could be unequivocally a Christian and
yet accept the critical attitude toward the bibli-
cal oracles, studying their meaning and con-
tent without preconceptions as in the case
of any other literature. At that time, all know,
most church standard-bearers and theological
leaders held to the traditional view of Scrip-
ture origins and to dogmatic methods in gen-
eral.

Our friend deeply reviewed this problem,
and, at risk of failure in the life-career he had
chosen, espoused, with modesty, moderation,
and reverence, yet with unflinching positive-
ness, the critical point of view. Men have rare-
ly acted with greater moral courage or with
happier results. Dr. Harper's conclusion being
decisive for a multitude of his disciples.

Mr. Harper stood a third time in the valley
of decision when called to determine the policy
of this University touching religion, to decide
whether or not it could be positively devout in
its attitude and yet boldy face the entire, un-
dimmed, and unrefracted light of science, phil-
osophy, and history — all that men's deepest re-
searches had revealed or could ever reveal.
Many thought such a combination impossible,
some of these speaking in the supposed interest
of religion, others in that of soi-disant science.

Our brother believed the friendly yoking

UNIVERSITY RECORD

of these two master-interests feasible, and
forthwith, in characteristic manner, resolved
to attempt it. It was, everything considered,
the boldest experiment ever made in the prem-
ises. Success crowned it, and the happy result
of the coronation appears in the conduct of the
University today, where true religion is posi-
tively honored, while the investigation of all
questions is nevertheless perfectly free, and
professors are employed solely because of their
character and learning, regardless of creed.

These episodes reveal the man's devout
spirit, deep, permanent, regnant. He could not
have otherwise acted.

Whoso hath felt the Spirit of the Highest
Cannot confound nor doubt him nor deny.

Yea, with one voice, O World, if thou deniest,
Stand thou on that side, for on this am I.

President Harper's was a pronouncedly re-
ligious nature. Could he at this hour speak
down through our air and find a way to our
dull understandings, he would most earnestly
commend to us faith in God as the sole high
inspiration that a child of earth can have. He
would assure us, "Herein lay the secret and
spring of all I wrought."

No providence of God is more inscrutable
than the cutting short of a benignly active
life at the zenith of its powers ; yet sometimes
a blessed light shines in upon the mystery of
even such an event. A life may be full and
rich much irrespective of its length. This was
never better illustrated than by the brief career
just ended. One's years form a satisfac-
tory tally, not because of their number, but
in proportion as he who lives them ignores
and forgets self and lays hold of the million
chances in the way of every earnest soul
to help on the cause of good, widen the skirts
of light, and make the realm of darkness nar-
rower. Here, our President would say, could
he speak to us now, here you have no continu-
ing city or abiding place, but precisely here

you have infinite opening for all manner of
loving service in imitation of Him who lived
and died for men.

His constant faith explains, as nothing else
can, our hero's unparalleled activity, begun in
youth and kept up incessant to the last, cheat-
ing death of his own ; and also that quenchless
enthusiasm marking all his work, which in-
spired friends, confuted opponents, warmed
the lethargic, and forced anthropologists to
note him as a new type of man. These traits
did not arise from President Harper's Titan
physique, his strong native good humor and
bent toward optimism. The secular man in him,
superior as it was, would never have produced
them. They were the manifestations of his
unique religious selfhood.

To the same origin we must trace the great
man's simplicity. I knew him when he was a
young teacher, with no fame and a slender in-
come. I have known him ever since. And I
must testify that he has in no essential of con-
duct or bearing ever changed. Promotion, re-
nown, power, applause, victory, did not make
him vain. Polite, hearty, friendly, sympathetic,
modest, retiring so far as his own personality
and prerogatives were concerned — these were
his characteristics at twenty, and they remained
unmodified at forty-nine.

He loved domesticity, privacy, reflection,
study, teaching, the simple and the quiet life.
Publicity, to be interviewed, photographed, ad-
vertised, gaped after by crowds, was not to his
taste. He could endure these infelicities be-
cause he had schooled himself to put up with
whatever distasteful things his life-plan brought
in his way. But he never liked them ; and as
years witnessed the multiplication of thtm, he
sighed — few knew how deep the desire — for
release. With joy unutterable would he, many
a time, but for a sense of duty not to do so,
have thrown up his public commission for the
chance to live again among his children, his

UNIVERSITY RECORD

pupils, and his books, as in his youthful years.
This inability of fame to make good the loss
of domestic joys another has voiced thus:

I came into the city and none knew me,
None came forth, none shouted He is here,

Nor a hand with laurel would bestrew me
All the way by which I drew anear,

Night my banner, and my herald. Fear.

But I knew where one so long had waited
In the low chamber by the stairway's height.

Trembling lest my foot should be belated.
Singing, sighing for the long hours' flight

Toward the moment of our dear delight.

I came into the city and you hailed me
Savior, and again your chosen lord,

Not one guessing what it was that failed me.
While, along the streets, as they adored,

Thousands, thousands shouted in accord.

But through all the joy I knew, I only.

How the Refuge of my heart lay dead and cold.

Silent of its music, and how lonely !
Never, though you crown me with your gold,

Shall I find that little chamber as of old.

Some, contemplating Dr. Harper's vast plans
and towering ambitions for his University, its
proud and numerous edifices, with others yet
more magnificent to come, and the stupendous
endowments realized and reached for, imag-
ined that the master-builder was moved by
pride, by lust for fame. It was an entire error.
Dr. Harper wished to rear an immense and
perfectly equipped university because he be-
lieved — and he was right — that the country,
civilization, and humanity needed such. Ra-
tional, far-sighted philanthropy was at work,
not pride at all save of the sort that is legiti-
mate, necessary to all high enterprise.

We have been told of the very remarkable
confidence Mr. Harper had in his own reason-
ings and plans, of his will, so firm and hard
to change. But he was not stubborn or opin-
ionated. He could sidestep or retreat as well

as advance, and he often did both. Witness,
too, his willingness, his desire to hear all sides,
all opinions, that he might not err. These are
not the ways of a self-willed man. If he
strongly believed in the essence of his plans,
he was like the prophets whom he loved and ex-
pounded so well. He had drunk in their spirit.
They worked and spoke for God out of a sense
of his presence in them, and so did he.

Rest, then, dear soldier of the legion and
soldier of the cross, rest thou forever! Thou
now wearest thy medal and thy crown, and
right richly dost thou deserve them. We still
camp upon the field; but, animated by thy ex-
ample and by the good spirit that was in thee,
we hope to fight well our fight and ultimately
to share thy rest, though few indeed of thy fel-
low-men may hope to attain thy glory.

ADDRESS

BY HARRY PRATT JUDSON
Dean of the Faculties of Arts, Literature, and Science

Today we stand face to face with the great
mystery of the ages — the mystery which eludes
philosophy, which has given the deepest thrill
to the song of the poet, its most somber tones
to music and art. Life now flows with abun-
dant tide through every vein — thought and joy
and strife, the tender touch of the hand of a
friend, the countless emotions and visions and
busy planning which fill the living soul — these
all are pulsing strong in the riotous vigor of
rugged vitality. But now — the great silence —
and for those who remain on this side the veil,

"Oh for the touch of a vanished hand.
And the sound of a voice that is still !"

The mystery envelopes us now. Its shadow
dims the sight and chills the heart. Is it mere
darkness — the darkness of a limitless void?
Is the speech of the old Northumbrian ealdor-
man true:

UNIVERSITY RECORD

So seems the life of man, O King, as a sparrow's
■ flight through the hall when you are sitting at meat
in winter-tide, with the warm fire lighted on the
hearth, but the icy rain-storm without. The sparrow
flies in at one door, and tarries for a moment in the
light and heat of the hearth-fire, and then, flying forth
from the other, vanishes into the wintry darkness
whence it came. So tarries for a moment the life of
man in our sight; but what is before it, what after it,
we know not.

Is this indeed all ? Is our great President in
some sense an answer?

The intellectual and spiritual founder of our
University was above all the incarnation of in-
tense life. He was cheerful energy personified.
His delight was in varied and unremitting
work ; his rest was in some other work. His
zest in activity was keen ; he had eager relish
in grappling with difficulty. In fact, to him
a difficulty was not a thing to evade nor to sur-
mount — it was a thing to go straight through.
Against adverse circumstance he was a very
Andrew Jackson of joyous and tenacious pug-
nacity. Beaten once, he returned again and
again to the attack with ever renewed spirit
and determination. It was the spirit of the
conqueror — the very ichor of victory- — which
flowed in his veins.

New forms of truth, new experience, new
outlooks on life, aroused always his eager inter-
est. He was not impatient with the common-
place — he ignored it, as he was always so ab-
sorbed in the unusual and the striking. He
foimd the world full of delightful problems
and of the most fascinating studies. He had the
seeing eye, which pierced the surface right to
the soul of things. And this was life — life in its
fulness and in its rich variety. In every teem-
ing sense of the word the President was dis-
tinctively a live man — and a man who rejoiced
in life.

A few phases of this busy and complex life
of his I wish to discuss briefly today.

First of all, he was a teacher — and with him

teaching was not mere tasteless drudgery
with which to earn his bread. Teaching — and
all his old students will assent to this — teach-
ing was to him a delight. He threw himself
into it with the same eager enthusiasm with
which he attacked any problem. His field was
a very special one. He seemed at one time to
think it his mission to set all the world studying
Hebrew — and under his magnetism it really
appeared as if it might be done. Any subject
under such a teacher would be a delight to
anyone. What becomes of the teacher's work?
The architect rears a stately mansion, the en-
gineer constructs a bridge of steel, the painter
puts on canvass his dream of beauty, and all
may come and look, and go, and look again.
The teacher throws into his chosen calling the
best energy of heart and brain, and it is gone —
dissipated among the silent forces which create
and recreate social life; it vanishes from sight
like a mist under the morning sun. But in
fact there is no loss. The true teacher's cre-
ative work lives on — lives long after the teacher
himself is gone — lives in the quickened intel-
lectual life of many souls, in the inspiration to
loftier ideals, in the character fashioned by his
glowing personality. Throughout this broad
land there are thousands of men and women
in whom our President has kindled a sacred
fire which is deathless. He lives in them.

Again, he was an eager investigator — a
truth-seeker. Conventional belief, dogma, tra-
dition, had for him no weight. The only ques-
tion was. Was it true? His was the real
scientific spirit. It was for this reason that
the biologist, the astronomer, the geologist, all
found in the professor of Hebrew so sympa-
thetic and intelligent a friend. His methods
were theirs. His cardinal canons of research
were identical with those of the men of science.
He could understand.

But he was inore than a seeker for truth.
Truth in itself is imbecile. It never won a.

UNIVERSITY RECORD

victory, it never cleansed a decayed society,
never uplifted the thoughts of men. But when
truth becomes incarnate, when it animates the
soul of a loyal and courageous man, then it is
no longer an abstraction of thought — then it is
a dynamic force. So was it with our President.
When he once clearly apprehended truth, it
possessed him. It was not laid away ticketed
on the shelf of the museum. It was the very
life of his life — it was himself. Hence came
the tremendous force of his advocacy of any
cause. His belief in it was not as in some ex-
traneous entity; he was himself the cause — -in
him it was incarnate.

It is here, it seems to me, that we find the
keynote of his complex character. Service to
others — that was the essence of his life. Scien-
tific truth which seemed to have no bearing
on bettering human conditions did not appeal
to him. If he found some form of learning a
spiritual benefit to himself, he was at once pos-
sessed with a passion for spreading it far and
wide. When the building of a university came
in his way, again he threw himself into it with
the same devoted enthusiasm — here was a new
way to help those who were in need. The
hunger for knowledge, the hunger for intel-
lectual thought, these forms of human desire
he longed to satisfy. No new kind of altruistic
endeavor appealed to him in vain. His inter-
ests therefore were manifold — but through
them all ran the one golden thread of service to
humanity. He had no atom of selfish ambi-
tion. In this age of greed and of shady public
life he shines as a star of pure white light.

Finally, this prince of teachers, with a pas-
sion for truth, truth inspired, busy always in
his multifarious forms of helpful energy, was
confronted suddenly with the supreme prob-
lem of life. Is there life beyond the silence?
\Vhat is it, and what means it?

These are questions which every thoughtful

man must in the end answer for himself from
the ripeness of his own experience. There are
those of us who find it impossible to consider
the orderly law of physical forces, the steady
sequence of cause and effect, the progressive
evolution of social progress, without the infer-
ence of an underlying power, intelligent, wise.
Then, on the other hand, as we face the appar-
ent futilities of existence, the incompleteness
of such a busy life as that of our President,
cut off in the flower of his ripened powers,
with so much yet to do, we cannot reconcile
it with the underlying wisdom unless on the
hypothesis that life goes on somewhere, in some
form, to the working out of full fruition.
Where? We do not know. How? We can-
not understand. In what form ? The question
is idle. Can a child think the thoughts of Leib-
nitz and Newton and Pasteur? What can one
believe save that our life here is a fragment
of a greater whole, a small arc of a mighty
circle whose curvature vanishes in the clouds,
but which yet is complete.

Men for many ages have tried to paint the
realities of a life after death, but have never
succeeded in more than imagery. The symbols
of poet and prophet and priest are but symbols,
rude and crude at the best. But that that life is
real, that it is better tlian the mind of man can
conceive, is the conclusion to which for me
there is no alternative. The logic is not that
of mathematics, which of necessity is conclu-
sive to all rational minds. Each man must
judge for himself; for me it is enough.

It was enough for our President. Further,
in his characteristic way he looked the problem
squarely in the face, he worked it out in
thorough fashion, he made the conclusion a
part of himself, bone of his bone, flesh of
his flesh, life of his life. He rested in the
serene assurance of a future of conscious ac-
tivity, in which his great mind and his great

12 UNIVERSITY RECORD

heart might find full scope. As he said to me By faith, and faith alone, embrace,

a few days before the last: "The end is soon Believing where we cannot prove;

coming. I am prepared — I do not say for the

worst— but for the best." Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:

May we not say, with the English poet: Thou madest man, he knows not why,

Strong Son of God, Immortal Love, He thinks he was not made to die;

Whom we, that have not seen thy face. And Thou hast made him: Thou art just.

UNIVERSITY RECORD

RESOLUTIONS IN MEMORY OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY

BY THE UNIVERSITY BOARD OF TRUSTEES

The Trustees of the University of Chicago,
neither as a body nor as individuals, can ever
express in terms that seem to them adequate
their opinion of President Harper or their sen-
timent for him. Long and close association
with him has constantly increased their admira-
tion and their affection. If it be true, in gene-
ral, that a man's intimates lose the edge of their
appreciation of his great qualities, then it is
a peculiar tribute to President Harper that we
who knew him so well, and who in the ordinary
course of our obligations were called upon to
scrutinize closely the proposals through which
he built up his wonderful life-work, are among
those who most admire his achievements, most
approve his methods, most wonder at his quali-
ties, and most love and cherish his memory.

He was to us, as he was to the outside dis-
cerning world, a great man. No American
of his day came more distinctly and unques-
tionably — and none more worthily — within the
small circle of the world's great men. And we
deliberately express the judgment that with
hardly more than a single exception no con-
temporary was more important to the nation,
or in view of actual and potential usefulness,
could be more missed from among the makers
of its highest progress.

The building of the University of Chicago
almost as with a magician's wand is the im-
mediate concrete monument of his most con-
spicuous activities. But that great — truly great
— construction was but the seat of his western,
his national, and his fast coming world-wide
influence. That such a University, compara-
ble with those that are the growths of cen-
turies, should have risen in fifteen years — with
every stick of its timber necessarily hewn and
fashioned from the forest — is one of the
marvels of human endeavor ; but it is paralleled

by the extraordinary development of a com-
paratively unknown professor, filling a chair of
remotest though deep learning in a quiet divin-
ity school, into a man whose achievements,
influence, and fame in education, religion, and
the progress of national ideals have made him
one of the most distinguished and important
men of his time.

He became a strong, virile leader. And he
developed all of the gifts that are necessary to
make leadership powerful, successful, famous,
and pure.

His imagination proved itself phenomenal,
but it was no more phenomenal than his com-
mon-sense. He showed unfailing initiative,
both intellectual and executive, and with it the
keenest practical sense of what could be
achieved. He spontaneously dealt with things
of such large importance, and with an outlook
and comprehension so broad and universal,
that, as his few prominent years went on, his
sphere grew larger and larger, and his life and
work grew more and more important, con-
structive, and leading.

We who knew how his thought grew, how
his imagination saw more and more clearly,
how his practical and wise plans took form,
and how his personality and leadership devel-
oped, feel how deep a pity it is that he could
not have continued his remarkable and almost
indispensable career. For he had wonderful
reserves of apparently inexhaustible growth
and force ; and ambitions and aims peculiar,
unselfish, and unsatisfied.

And yet, in his comparatively brief oppor-
tunity, he accomplished so much and in so mas-
terful and complete a manner that his work
is thoroughly established, and with abundant
vitality and individuality. He did not com-
plete his plans ; indeed, such fruitful genius
as his never could complete itself ; but he has

UNIVERSITY RECORD

left enduring foundations of immense breadth,
and enough superstructure to guide those who
come after him. He lived enough and wrought
enough to start a new epoch and to endow it
with lasting consciousness. Short as his public
life was, he lived long enough to become the
maker of an epoch.

But these great satisfactions of his career
still leave us with the immense personal loss
of his inspiring and delightful personality ; and
we must mourn him with no hope of replacing
his tender, touching, strong friendship and
companionship. He has left with us, however,
and with thousands of others, a personal
memory which will remain permanently fresh
and stimulating by reason of his exalted char-
acter and life.

The full, final, and just appreciation of Presi-
dent Harper's work can come only with time.
He was highly valued and understood even
while he lived, and few creative and con-
structive leaders have enjoyed more quick rec-
ognition. But his fame will now inevitably
begin to grow anew.

BY THE UNIVERSITY SENATE REPRESENTING
THE FACULTIES

In the death of William Rainey Harper,
President of the University of Chicago, we rec-
ognize a loss to which we can give no adequate
expression. Insufficient as our words must be,
we yet desire to place on record a memorial
of our profound sense of bereavement, and an
expression of our exalted appreciation of the
rare qualities and the phenomenal work of the
Father of the University.

Called to labor with him by his own selection
and accorded without reserve the place of
brothers and counselors in service, we found
in him at once a leader and a friend, and in his
loss we are doubly bereft. To a degree rarely
equaled, he made us partakers of counsel with

him for the welfare of the University. He
freely placed before us his plans and purposes
and invited the unreserved discussion of them.
To an extent limited only by confidential rela-
tionships and obvious obligations, he took us
into his confidence, opened to us from time to
time his hopes and dreams, and made us sharers
in the responsibilities of the development of the
University. In all this he encouraged in his co-
workers independence of thought and opinion,
fostered the utmost freedom in expression and
action, and extended to all the unrestrained
privilege of initiative. Not only did he court
criticism of plans and projects, and evoke the
full measure of conflicting opinion relative to
educational policies, but he welcomed the
strenuous opposition which this freedom and
independence not infrequently brought to bear
on his own cherished plans. Through the
large confidence thus reposed, the strong in-
dividuality of thought thus stimulated, and the
conflict of divergent views thus evoked, he
sought the highest available light for the guid-
ance of the institution.

This was but an active expression of that
earlier and more fundamental manifestation of
his catholicity of spirit shown in the choice of
co-workers from men of the most diverse aca-
demic relationships, the most varied educa-
tional experiences, the most divergent reli-
gious, political, and social affiliations, and the
most declared personalities. The only essen-
tials to his confidence were character and
ability, combined with educational and investi-
gative power.

In the inner work of the University he joined
to marvelous achievements in securing and or-
ganizing means for instruction by others the
inspiring example of his own masterly teach-
ing. As executive, he procured for his col-
leagues opportunities of research, and to their
productions added his own prolific and schol-
arly contributions. Through these phenomenal

UNIVERSITY RECORD

labors, he not only organized, directed, and
stimulated, but led by his own example. His
personal and intelligent interest in every de-
partment of the work of the University was
felt by all. To an exceptional degree he was in
sympathetic touch with every phase of the en-
deavors of his colleagues.

We wish to record our profound admiration
of the height and breadth of his conception
of a university's functions. With the fullest
sympathy for the work of the colleges and all
the antecedent schools, for extensional and
pedagogical education, for professional training,
and for all recognized university activities, he
sought to e.xtend the institution's work to neg-
lected fields. Especially did he seek to promote
original research in all the higher realms of
human interest, and to give to the world the
fullest and best accredited truth through ap-
propriate publications. The results thus far
realized are but meager foreshadowings of his
larger hopes, whose fruition, we trust, will,
through others hands, yet crown his labors.

With the progressive embodiment of these
large ideals and sympathies in concrete
achievement there kept pace, step by step, a
growth of ideas in which accessions from a
multitude of sources were conjoined with his
own fertile conceptions and moulded by his
own originality. In this evolution he blended
reverence for the past with appreciation of the
present and anticipation of the future. He
united in a singular degree conservatism and
progressiveness, idealism and practicality, the
intellectual and the emotional, the material and
the spiritual. Consonant with this, he was in
cordial sympathy at once with physical, with
intellectual, with social, and with religious
education, and regarded all as but necessary
parts of a composite whole.

The wonderful activity, the abounding cheer-
fulness, the unhesitating courage that sig-
nalized- his endeavors have ever commanded

our highest admiration ; and their influence on
the future life of the University constitutes a
possession of incalculable value.

In the intimacy of our relations we have
come to know that with the joys of great
achievements and the higher delights of
scholarly pursuits there was commingled keen
suffering from the thrusts of unjust criticism
and misinterpretation of his aims and motives.
Nobly as he accepted the conscientious oppo-
sition and the open criticisms, however severe,
of those who sought with him the best way and
the best things, it was not the least of the tests
of his fortitude that he bore with cheepfulness
and without reply the detractions that sprang
from unworthy motives, from careless miscon-
struction, or from indifference to the great
ends for which he labored.

Other great qualities endeared him to us as
individuals, and had no small share in making
him a leader whom we could love and trust.
Notable among these was his strong personal
interest in every member of the University
staff. Many who felt that their relations to
him had been entirely and merely official found
with surprise, when suffering or distress as-
sailed them, that the President's interest, far
from being merely official, was personal, warm,
and unwaveringly faithful. No clamor, how-
ever loud, no opposition, however powerful,
could move him; and his simple statement a
few days before he died that he had never
abandoned a man under popular attack was
one which many had long ago formulated
for him from experience or observation. So
careful, so sensitive was he upon this point
that he sometimes seemed to have carried his
principle too far.

Under the shadow of the last year of suf-
fering and impending death we have come to
realize, as never before, the greatness of Presi-
dent Harper's personality. Far above the
courage that so unhesitatingly met the diffi-

UNIVERSITY ME CORD

culties of great endeavors in the years of his
vigor, rises that moral fortitude that calmly
accepted the unalterable decree and used each
remnant of failing strength in a heroic effort
to finish, so far as he might, the work he had
begun, and so to order the rest that it might
suffer as little as possible from the withdrawal
of his guiding hand. The fortitude and faith
of these closing months are a monument of
moral greatness whose influence in the future
life of the University cannot be measured. It
is the most precious legacy of a noble life.

E. B. HULBERT.

E. D. Burton.

J. P. Hall.

J. M. Manly.

T. C. Chamberlin.

BY THE UNIVERSITY CONGREGATION
At the fifty-first meeting of the University
Congregation, held on Monday, March 19,
1906, it was moved that the following minute
be adopted, and spread upon the records of the
Congregation :

"The passing of President William Rainey
Harper completes an epoch in the history of the
University of Chicago, and it belongs to the
Congregation to register its appreciation of the
special phase of his work and his aims which
its organization represents.

"Among all the distinctive features which
President Harper's creative genius wrought
into the structure of the University, none is
more largely due to his own initiative than the
Congregation. Although this body was not
specifically provided for in the original pro-
spectus, the idea which it was later devised to
realize was among the most important of the
fundamental conceptions upon which the
University was based. The University that
was projected in President Harper's thought
should be, not less than the older institutions.

first and foremost a society of scholars. Much
more than they, however, it should be aware
both of its subordination to society at large and
of its vocation to serve the world. President
Harper was not content that the reaction be-
tween the University and the world should be,
on either side, by a mere unconscious process
of emanation and absorption. He believed
that the University should exercise both pro-
phetic and priestly offices in society, but he also^
believed that, in order to discharge these func-
tions, the University must guard its vital union
with the developing life of the community. He
was eager for the University to be distin-
guished as a formative factor in democracy. At
the same time he most earnestly desired that
all the graduates of the University, whether
engaged in academic work or not, should re-
main in co-operation with their Alma Mater.

"These two motives gave birth to the Con-
gregation. President Harper believed that the
alumni may accomplish much, both as media-
tors of the ideals of the University to society
at large, and as interpreters of the more con-
crete interests of life to the University. To his
mind the Congregation was a promising means
of blending academic and non-academic in-
fluences in adapting the work of the University
to socials needs.

"The Congregation unites with the other
official bodies of the University in testimony
of admiration, respect, and love for President
Harper as a scholar, as a teacher, as a leader,
and as a man. It is especially appropriate that
this tribute should, in addition, emphasize
President Harper's ambition to unify scholar-
ship and life, and in particular his hope that
the University of Chicago might be foremost
in achieving this unity. He strongly believed
that the Congregation would contribute largely
to this end. He confidently predicted that this
assemblage of alumni with members of the
Faculties, to compare views about educational

UNIVERSITY RECORD

policy, would eventually have great significance,
on the one hand in saving the University from
sterile pedantries, on the other hand in trans-
planting all that is fruitful in university ideals
into the large life of the world.

"President Harper's work has already be-
come the guiding tradition of the University.
No part of that tradition deserves to be more
loyally cherished than that of which the Con-
gregation is both guardian and symbol."

BK THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE DIVINITY
SCHOOL

At a meeting of the Board of Trustees of
the Divinity School held on January ii, 1906,
resolutions were spread upon the minutes, set-
ting forth the life and character of President
Harper. Included in these resolutions were
the following special testimonies to the late
President :

"First of all. President Harper was a student.
He loved original investigation. He had a pas-
sion for fundamentals. In him the modem
historic method and large academic freedom
had a noble exemplification and advocate. His
influence in these realms cannot now be fully
estimated. While his name in public became
afterward more identified with university man-
agement, the love of his heart lingered in the
study and classroom. His attainments as a

Semitic scholar have a world-wide acknowl-
edgment.

"He had marvelous talents as a teacher: he
had the magnetism of passionate fondness for
his tasks ; his personality was in all his in-
struction, making it vital and interesting as
well as solidly instructive.

"He had unsurpassed genius for organiza-
tion and administration as an executive. It
was this commanding ability that made leading
business men respect him and bow to the ur-
gency of his lofty ideals.

"Such a man would naturally find dissent
and opposition at times ; but in all such experi-
ence he ever maintained masterful self-control.
To oppose a new venture of his was never to
lose his esteem or friendship. He met one
defeat by another new-born project more skil-
fully adjusted than the last.

"He had a tact born, not of compromise, but
of deep determination that could wait and in
the meantime flood the intervening space with
the sunshine of kindliness always sure to win
its way for a more lenient treatment.

"His fidelity to associates was of rarest
quality ; his devotion to friends of the inner
circle like that of Jonathan and David.

"He was profoundly ethical. His religion
was of that reverent, wide, simple kind that
made him a brother to any man who feared
God sincerely."

UNIVERSITY RECORD

MEMORIAL ADDRESS AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY'

BY JOSEPH HENRY BEALE, JR., LL.D.

Professor of Lauu in Harvard Uniuersity; formerly Dean of the Law School, the University of Chicago

When a great man dies, the thing the world
thinks of first is, what he has done, what he
has done for mankind, what he has achieved in
his useful life. And in setting in order our
memory of the great man whom we meet to
honor, the first thing that we must think of is
the achievement that he has made in his short
but busy life. He was a man of most con-
structive mind, a man with the mind of a cap-
tain of industry. He originated a great scheme,
and a novel scheme, for the University which
he founded; a scheme which some thought ran
too much to form and system, too rigidly en-
compassed about with rules which hampered
in some ways the growth of the University. He
himself never was hampered by the form that
he provided for the child of his mind. He
knew when to brush aside the forms that he
had made and when to take a step ahead in spite
of the rules laid down beforehand.

But his greatness was not in the form that
he provided. The plans that he made, the new
features for university life which he adopted,
proved themselves so immediately useful that
they have had a profound influence upon uni-
versity life throughout the country, and espec-
ially in the Middle West. His plan of separa-
tion of the academic department into an earlier
preliminary part, a part in which the manners
and minds of the students should be moulded
rather than left to expand by themselves, and
a later part in which greater academic free-
dom should be given to them will, I believe, be
the base on which will be built our future uni-
versity organizations ; and it has already spread
through a large part of the country and has

'This address was given at a special memorial
service in Appleton Chapel, Harvard University, on
Saturday, January 13, 1906.

profoundly influenced the university life in the
West. His plan of using to the full extent
throughout the whole of the year the resources
of his university has been followed, and is likely
to be followed in the future very widely, and
by putting into exercise this plan he brought to
many men the opportunity which they otherwise
would not have had of getting the benefit of
a university education.

In carrying out his plans the first great qual-
ity that he showed was that of judgment of the
men whom he employed to help him. His
judgment of men was quick and almost unfail-
ing. It took only a few minutes for him to
make up his mind, and his mind once made up
rarely had to be changed, and it was these
lieutenants that he chose who carried out for
him the work which he had first originated.
One would seldom find the head of a great
enterprise who little interferes in the actual
working out of the details of the administra-
tion. Dr. Harper seldom visited the depart-
ments of his university, almost never interfered
in the actual administration of the rules, or even
in the greater aflfairs of policy. If he chose a
man and trusted him, he left him free to carry
out his ideas and to reach results.

No, it was not by control of the action of
his lieutenants that he accomplished what he
did for education in this country. It was, after
choosing the right man, by putting into. him
his own spirit of enthusiastic devotion. No man
ever came in contact with Dr. Harper, to work
along with him, without getting from him that
touch of fire which enabled him to perform mir-
acles of work. It was not, then, by directing
the details of their action, but by stirring up
their enthusiasm, by infusing into them some
of his own enormous energy that he was able

UmVERSITY RECORD

to get the co-operation that was necessary to
carry on his work, and it was thus that he
achieved his success.

But, after all, we who knew him better and
loved him because we knew him, we think more
today, and I am sure we shall think more
throughout our lives, of him on the other side —
the side of his life which the world at large did
not know and could not know. At first sight,
he seemed to a stranger to be nothing but a
man of energy, of push, rather unattractive, a
man whose success was almost inexplicable. To
those who knew him better his was a loyal,
lovely, sensitive soul ; a man who was deeply
pained by the misunderstanding that he met
throughout his life. He had the mind and
manners of a captain of industry, but he had
the heart and soul of a scholar and a sage. That
brave heart, which throughout all the suffering
of the last years kept him true to his work.

kept him courageous and brave to do what
was in him to do; that loyal heart, which led
him throughout all this time to devotion to
the university to which he had given his life,
where he would rather have devoted the last
years to the completion of that work of schol-
arship which was, after all, the chosen work
of his heart; that sympathetic heart, which en-
abled him to say just the word that would
soothe sorrow or encourage weakness and wear-
iness; that faithful heart, which made him the
model of devotion, the model of life, for every
man that knew him, and which led him to die
with those words on his lips, "God always helps."
No, to the world he was a great administrator,
but the side of his life which will appeal to us,
the side of his life which we shall remember and
love, was the life of family affection, the life
of the student, and the service, not to the world,
but to his friends and to his neighbors.

UNIVERSITY RECORD

MEMORIAL ADDRESSES AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY'

ADDRESS

BY NICHOLAS MURHAY BUTLER
President of Columbia University

We are here to mark the passing of a noble
life — a life dear to not a few of us and full of
cheer and inspiration to every human being who
loves knowledge, who hopes for achievement,
and who aspires to service. It was a very long
life. Not a full hundred years of usual accom-
plishment could measure it. It was a very rich
life. Joy, happiness and satisfactions that gold
cannot buy filled it to overflowing. For him
and for his service, we rejoice and give thanks;
for ourselves we sorrow because we have lost
sight of a friend, and the world of a man.

Hidden deep down in Nature's secrets are
the rare qualities which, assembled in just the
proper proportions, make men. Scholars,
high-minded and serious of purpose, are many.
Doers, active, confident, and successful, are
more numerous still. Men are harder to come
upon, and our friend was a man. He loved
life and the joy of living. His world was a
good and a happy world, where the better was
constantly conquering the bad.

He hated cant and those petty appearances
that are the garment of hypocrisy. He knew
the difference between public opinion, founded
on right reason, and the clamor of the mob,
schooled or unschooled, founded on prejudice
and passion. He did not mistake applause for
approval. Neither the opposition of the un-
convinced, the sneer of the cynic, nor the cry
of the self-seeker, could move him from his
purpose. So it was that good things were done
by him and with his leadership.

He had a genius for friendship. Hooks of

steel bound him to those he cared for, and his
care-free hours were his most delightful ones.
Study schooled his spirit, travel broadened it,
human intercourse deepened and enriched it.
All that he was and had he gave to his friends
and they returned the gift in fullest measure.

From boyhood to his closing hour on earth,
he served the higher life. Eager in pursuit of
knowledge, skilful in imparting it, and re-
sourceful in applying it, he never lost sight of
the main goal of his life. The marshaling of
human forces in a great university was always
subordinate with him to scholarly purpose. He
often spoke of it so to those to whom he could
trust his inmost thought.

He died, they say, like a Spartan. How false !
He died like a Christian whose faith is real and
not a thing of formulas alone. Brave, confi-
dent, enduring, he stood at his post of duty
while the shadows closed around him, and as
Time's sun set he turned his face to be illu-
mined by Eternity's morning light.

As the years pass, the circle of real friends
grows narrower. Those who are left treasure
always more highly the associations that re-
main. They love to dwell upon the days that
are gone and to review in memory those acts
and traits that were so abounding in gfrace and
in delight.

I climb the hill : from end to end
Of all the landscape underneath,
I find no place that does not breathe

Some gracious memory of my friend.

' These addresses were given at a special memorial
service held at Columbia University, New York City,
on Sunday, January 14, 1906. An address by Presi-
dent Woodrow Wilson, of Princeton University, was
also given at this service.

ADDRESS

BY CHARLES CUTHBERT HALL

President of the Union Theological Seminary

In the diary of Thomas Arnold of Rugby
stands an entry which was the last he ever made.
It was made on the evening before his forty-
seventh birthday. The next morning he died
of angina pectoris. The entry is as follows:

UNIVERSITY RECORD

How large a portion of my life on earth is already-
passed ! Still there are works which, with God's
permission, I would do before the night cometh. But
above all let me mind my own personal work — to
keep myself pure and zealous and believing — labor-
ing to do God's will, yet not anxious that it should
be done by me rather than by others, if God disap-
proves of my doing it.

Between Thomas Arnold and William Har-
per there were many differences of personal
quality, yet in ways there were also strong re-
semblances. Both realized at forty-seven that
the end of life was near. In the case of Arnold
the prophecy was fulfilled immediately; in the
case of Harper two years later at forty-nine.
Both as ardent educators were filled with plans
waiting development; both on receiving the
intimation of approaching death sought in
brave self-surrender to be willing that others
should carry into efl'ect those cherished plans.
Both, through life and in the hour of departure,
sought above all else to do the will of God.

I would that it might be known by all, as it
is known by those who were nearest to Presi-
dent Harper, how profoundly all his plans were
filled with religious devotion and unselfish de-
sire for the good of others. In the develop-
ment of the University his interest was not per-
sonal aggrandizement but the creation of larger
opportunity for the young men and women of
this country. In his labor to establish the Re-
ligious Education Association, he was express-
ing only patriotic solicitude that the nation he
loved should not surrender itself to the domin-
ion of material ideals. In his zeal to cultivate
academic relations with India and the Far East,
bis ambition was that the gulf between East
and West, if not removed, might at least be
bridged for the interchanges of thought be-
tween earnest men who could trust each other.

I would that all could know concerning him

what some of us know, how gentle was his per-
sonal life. To see him in his home, surrounded
by his children, or radiant with hospitality at
the head of his table, was to receive an impres-
sion of his personality which can never be re-
moved from the mind upon which it has rested.

I cannot conceive that his plans for the Uni-
versity, the country, and the oriental world
remain unfulfilled. His influence must continue,
mediated and enlarged through the devotion
of those who, surviving him, shall attempt to
consummate his purposes on these several lines.

There come to my remembrance, suggested
by the early ending of this eager and full career,
the noble words, written long ago and >mder
other circumstances, by James Montgomery, yet
deeply applicable in the present hour —

"Servant of God ! well done.

Rest from thy loved employ;
The battle fought, the victory won.
Enter Thy Master's joy."

— The voice at midnight came;
He started up to hear:
A mortal arrow pierced his frame.
He fell — but felt no fear.

At midnight came the cry,

"To meet thy God prepare!"
He woke, and caught his Captain's eye;
Then strong in faith and prayer,
His spirit, with a bound.
Bursts its encumbering clay :
His tent, at sunrise, on the ground
A darkened ruin lay.

The pains of death are past.

Labor and sorrow cease,
And life's long warfare closed at last,
His soul is found in peace .

Soldier of Christ! well done;
Praise be thy new employ;
And while eternal ages run,
Rest in thy Savior's joy.

22 UNIVERSITY RECORD

PRESIDENT HARPER'

(January 10, 1906)

BY ANDREW FLEMING WEST
Dean of the Graduate School, Princeton University

With those who live from day to day,
Not as they would, but as they may.
And step by step hold on their way.
Give me, O God, a place.

Too easily we do and dare
When help is near and life is fair.
And dreams come true — O then how rare
The venture of the race!

Each new day sees a new world born.
Each day a life, and sloth a scorn:
On to the end ! the sun of morn
Shall never lose its light.

O days of dark and fiery pain !
The work half-done, and help in vain,
Tired out the heart, tired out the brain:
JVow gird thee for the fight.

Undying Hope in dying man !
"Not all we would, but all we can; —
Good cheer, good cheer" — his message ran,
And we that word must keep.

The work half-done ? Nay, all is done.
Tired Workman, rest. Thou hast begun
Thy work in us. O crown well won !
Sleep, silent hero, sleep.

With those who live from day to day.
Not as they would but as they may.
And step by step hold on their way,
Give me, O God, a place.

' Read at the special memorial service held at Columbia University on Sunday, January 14, 1906. The poem was
also read at the memorial meeting of the student body in Leon Mandel Assembly Hall, University of Chicago, on
Monday, January 15, by Professor William Gardner Hale, Head of the Department of Latin.

PRESIDENT WILLIAM R. HARPER
Died January i o, 1906

UNIVERSITY RECORD

MEMORIAL ADDRESS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS'
BY PRESIDENT EDMUND J. JAMES

When great and good men pass away, it is
proper that in response to those deeper in-
stincts of humanity which make for the higher
life of the race we shall turn aside from our
accustomed vocations for a time and with
bared heads and devout hearts pay our last
respects to their memory. This not so much
on their account, for they have passed beyond
being affected by what we say or do or think,
but for our own sakes, and the sake of our fel-
low men, of our society, of our civilization. The
study of the work and life of the men who
have been intellectually and morally great has
ever been one of the most fruitful sources of
new interest in the things which make for right-
eousness and efficiency in human life. We give
our children the biographies of the great and
good men of the past, with the hope that their
aspirations may be awakened for the best things
in life, and their determination quickened to
reach for those higher things, to live the higher
life in every sense of that word.

It is not easy for us, of course, to gauge
properly the services or character of the men
with whom we live, and with whom we have
worked and toiled. We are almost inevitably
driven either to overestimate or to underesti-
mate their strength and power. If they have
been leaders in whom we have had confidence
and to whom we have looked up with respect,
we may easily exaggerate their importance for

^In the absence of President James, who was in
attendance at the funeral of President Harper, this
address was read by Professor David Kinley, Dean
of the College of Literature and Arts. Other ad-
dresses at the memorial service at the University
of Illinois, which was held on Sunday, January 14,
1906, were made by Professor Thomas J. Burrill,
Vice-President of the University; Professor Edwin
G. Dexter, and Assistant Professors James W. Gar-
ner and Edward O. Sisson.

our day and generation and for the time which
is to come. If we have been in conflict with
them and struggled for other things than they ;
if we have had differences of opinion, and have
tried to make our own ideas effective and pros-
ecute through to success our own plans against
their will, it is easy for us to underestimate,
not simply their power and vigor but their good
faith, their honesty of purpose, their moral
courage. And so of course the ultimate estimate
of a man's life and character must be deferred
until long after he has passed away. But
that should not prevent us from expressing
our opinions and ideas now as to what men are
doing and have done whom we have known,
and with whom we have lived and worked,,
for our testimony is one of the evidences which
will be used by the historians of the future in-
making up their judgment as to the really vital
influence of those few men whose memory pos-
terity will cherish and whose biographies pos-
terity will read.

I make no apology, therefore, in using what
some may think exaggerated language in pre-
senting an estimate which some men may think
is too high ; but I know, at any rate, whereof I
speak so far as facts are concerned; and the
judgment of different men in interpreting these
facts will, of course, be almost as various as the
men themselves.

Doctor William Rainey Harper was not a
native of Illinois. He has lived in this state less
than half of the years allotted to him, and his
really prominent activity began only sixteen
years ago. But in that time, without having
held any public office ; without having been as-
sociated with any military glory ; without hav-
ing written any books which have commanded
wide interest; without being distinguished as
an orator; without having achieved distinction

UNIVERSITY RECORD

in politics; without having accumulated great
wealth ; without having managed any great bus-
iness enterprise, as great business enterprises are
counted nowadays, he had risen, at the time of
his death, to the position of the most distin-
guished citizen of the state of Illinois. No man
at the bar, in business, in politics, has won for
the city of Chicago and this great common-
wealth which we all so love, such universal
recognition and distinction in the last decade as
Doctor Harper. There is not a village in the
United States where his name is not known,
where there is not some soul which has been
touched by one or another of the manifold influ-
ences which his unique personality set in mo-
tion, and has not been lifted to higher levels
because of his contact with these influences.
There has not been a man in the world in the
last decade, who has been more widely known
as an educator, as a creator, as a prophet, as a
poet in the old Greek sense of the term, in this
field of education.

Doctor Harper has been simply a teacher
and an educational administrator. As a teacher
he had achieved national reputation before he
was elected president of the University of Chi-
cago. He had organized one enterprise after
another with educational aims and purposes
which had begun to exercise a remarkable influ-
ence in the respective fields in which they were
at work. As president of the University of Chi-
cago, he has achieved world-wide reputation as
an educational organizer and educational seer.
He was, in the best sense of the term, and in
the large sense of that term, an educational
statesman ; and I know no better illustration of
the real significance and importance to any hu-
man society, of the seer and the prophet, as
compared with the man of mere routine admin-
istrative efficiency, than a comparison between
Doctor Harper and his activity and that of the
ordinary successful college president. He was
not content with building up an institution which

should merely duplicate the work of another
institution. He would evidently not have been
content even with putting this institution at the
very head of the institutions of the world, in the
work which they were doing at the time this
institution was organized. On the contrary, he
aimed to strike out new paths, to blaze new
trails, to enter unexplored country and win over
for the race undiscovered wealth in these new
territories. He tried many experiments. Some
of them, of course, failed, others did not suc-
ceed; but he introduced new elements into the
educational life of this western country, and I
believe of this nation, and ultimately of the
world, which alone would have made it worth
while for him to have lived and toiled.

He was not merely content with organizing
this institution, this university, even with these
new outlooks for a university, but his mind was
ranging over the whole field of educational life
and history with the eternal question. Is this the
best thing to do? Is this the best way to do it?
Where and how can improvements be made?
He was a man, therefore, who made educational
issues and, in this respect, only President Eliot,
of Harvard, can be compared with him in the
whole educational history of the United States.
College faculties and university faculties in the
Mississippi valley have been discussing for ten
years new issues which in one form or another
he projected or made more vital than they had
been before. He was concerned with every-
thing which touched education from the kinder-
garten to the university, and there was nothing
too small and nothing too large for his intellect
to grapple with and his sympathy to seize upon.

Certainly all teachers and educational admin-
istrators ought to feel under a profound debt
of gratitude for this life and career. I think no
single man has done so much to raise the popu-
lar estimate of the teacher's vocation, the profes-
sor's calling, the university president's occupa-
tion, as Doctor Harper. His strong and vigor-

UNIVERSITY RECORD

ous personality struck the popular imagination
in a way to fix attention upon the things which
he was urging upon the public, and I think it is
■not too much to say that every teacher in a
rural district, in a public high school, in a col-
lege or a university in the United States today,
enjoys a larger respect in the mind of the com-
mon man, because of the influence of Doctor
Harper's work. I am confident that the pecun-
iary returns for teacher's work and the money
expended on lower as well as higher education
in the Mississippi Valley are today larger, and
in the future will be still larger, because of the
indirect, reflex, subtile influence of this increas-
ing respect for the profession which such a
career as this is bound to beget. Our western
world today is turning aside to pay their re-
spects to this man ; and in their doing that they
cannot help being influenced by the things for
which he stood, the policies which he advocated,
the ideals which he cherished and urged upon
their attention. It is hardly necessary to add
that the effect of his work has been to stimulate
greatly the facilities and opportunities for
higher education in this Mississippi Valley. It
is easier for us here at Illinois today to get
money from the legislature for the higher work
which we ought to be carrying on. It is easier
for us to get money for necessary equipment
than it would have been except for his activity.
The establishment of the University of Chicago
with the announcement of the things for which
it was to stand, opened a new era in this Mis-
sissippi Valley. Every institution of higher
learning has profited by these altered standards
and these higher ideals.

I was privileged to stand in very close rela-
tions for seven years with Doctor Harper. As
director of one of the chief administrative divis-
ions of the University I came in contact with
him almost daily upon one or another question
of university policy. I had many differences of
opinion with him as to the wisdom of this or

that policy ; but I never discussed any subject
without getting a new point of view, new ideas,
and even if I were not convinced, a higher re-
spect for the intellectual power, for the moral
earnestness, for the devotion to the highest and
best things, which characterized this man.

A president of a great university in the United
States today, must assume such a multiplicity
of duties, must decide such a vast variety of
questions, that his decisions must oftentimes be,
and still more often seem to be, arbitrary and
ungrounded in considerations of wisdom. He
must keep in mind so absolutely the interests of
the institution which he represents that he must
sometimes seem to be unsympathetic and some-
times perform acts which seem inconsiderate,
and even cruel. His only consolation is a feel-
ing that he is doing his duty according to his
best light. But he should do it with all due con-
sideration, with all due respect to the feelings
and rights of others. Dr. Harper had such a
vast range of enterprises under his direct super-
vision and control that his decisions oftentimes
had to be made very quickly, and steps taken
which, though in the interest of the enterprise,
seemed to inflict hardship upon persons con-
nected with it. I had occasion to witness the
conflict in President Harper's mind in many
of these cases. His kind feeling for the diffi-
culties and troubles of others, his deep sym-
pathy with every aspiration toward higher
things, inflicted upon him the keenest pain in
connection with many steps which he was com-
pelled by circumstances to take. And I have
known him on many occasions to go out of his
way for years after he had been compelled to
inflict a wound, in order to lessen the pain and
discomfort of that affliction by every means in
his power. It was this feeling of sympathy
which rallied to his support the enthusiastic de-
votion of the men who worked with him. I
never felt, myself, even when he was doing
things which I did not like or disapproved of

UNIVEBSITT RECORD

most heartily, as he sometimes did, that he was
animated by any other motive than the highest
interest of the enterprises committed to his care.

The Hfe of a man occupying such a position is
in many respects a most lonely one. He cannot
have friends in the ordinary sense of the term,
that is, people whose interests he can advance
in season and out of season, solely from his love
for them, solely from his regard for their ad-
vancement. As a man grows older in such
work, it becomes more difficult to make friends
outside of his particular occupation, outside of
the lines which are absorbing his attention ; life
becomes more lonely and the path he treads
more devoid of companionship. That Dr. Har-
per felt this most keenly and suffered from it in
the last years of his life, I have good reason to
know. But it only served to make him more
devoted to the interests he represented, to the
cause he cherished, to the ideals he was promot-
ing.

I must not make these remarks too long, and
I have only time to note one other thing in his
career that seems to me may be an encourage-
ment to any and all of us; and that is that his
career represents the vast range of opportunity
open to every young American. Graduating in
such a small college down in Ohio that I doubt
whether anyone of you ever heard of it except
as the place where he graduated, without
wealth or prominent social position or friends of
pecuniary or political influence, he stood abso-
lutely on his own feet facing the world, when, a
young fellow of eighteen or nineteen, having
already taught for a short time in one of the dis-
tricts of Tennessee, he went to Yale University
for further study. No one, however, could
come in contact with him, of course, without
recognizing a man of power ; and it was natural
that he should make an impression upon his in-
structors at Yale. But the only position open to
him when he came out was that of an instructor
in a theological school near Chicago. But from

his study room in this theological school he
started educational enterprises which were des-
tined to have a wide influence, and will continue
to have an influence far beyond the present gen-
eration. Here he "grew in grace and in the ad-
monition of the Lord" till his great opportunity
came ; and as the opportunity widened and en-
larged he measured himself up to it in the full-
est possible manner. There never was a time
in the development of the University of Chi-
cago, from the first $600,000 which was prom-
ised by Mr. Rockfeller on condition that $400,-
000 more be raised, up to the time when its
total property amounted to five millions or ten
or fifteen or twenty millions that Dr. Harper
did not appear distinctly and plainly as greater
than the situation, as able to utilize wisely for
education still more and still greater opportuni-
ties. There never was a time in which he did
not dominate, in the good sense of that term, the
situation and the whole situation, educational
and financial, by his personality.

Young friends, people tell us sometimes that
there are today no opportunities in American
life. In fact, the opportunities are just begin-
ning to open up, and some of you who are sit-
ting here today will live to see a period in which
the achievements of the last century and the
last generation will be so completely cast into
the shade in every department of intellectual
and moral effort that you will look back upon us
and our predecessors as we look back upon the
eighteenth and seventeenth and sixteenth cen-
turies. Opportunities are here in infinite abund-
ance. Closed doors over which is written the
word "opportunity" may be seen about us in
every direction. They are waiting for the man
with the magic touch to knock upon them. They
are locked, many of them, with combination
locks, it is true, but somewhere the man will
be found who will understand their mechanism
and know how to open these doors, which will
then reveal such vistas of work and achieve-

UNIVERSITY BE CORD

ment as the whole past history of the race can-
not afford. The question is, are you and I
ready to avail ourselves of these opportunities?
Are we, in the quiet of our study rooms, in the
whirl of our factories, amid the rustling tassels
of our corn fields, developing those qualities,
moral as well as intellectual, which must under-
lie any great success? For we must not lose
sight of the fact, and I have not dwelt upon it
because it was so evident that I did not think
it worth the notice, that Dr. Harper's success
after all was not his intellectuality and not his
rare sympathy for humanity, but his moral
qualities and moral nature. Not all his intel-
lectuality and not all his sympathy could have
accomplished any of these things if they had
not been grounded in a moral character, in a
moral nature which dominated and controlled
them all.

I believe that when the history of the last fifty
years of Illinois is written a century from now
by the historian who can pick out the real forces

that have determined the life of this common-
wealth in the century to come, after the names
of Grant and Lincoln, no name will be enrolled
higher than that of Dr. Harper — but yesterday
the first citizen of Chicago, and one of the fore-
most educators of the world.

William Rainey Harper: The foremost fig-
ure of the last decade in the educational field
either in Europe or America; an educational
statesman of the first order ; a man of the rarest
insight into the very inmost recesses of the
forces which make for the higher life in our
civilization ; a leader of men, of broad views,
wide sympathies, and uplifting influence.
Every institution of higher learning in the Mis-
sissippi Valley is doing better and larger work
today because of his efforts. If the University
of Chicago had done nothing else in the last fif-
teen years than afford an opportunity for un-
folding the activities of this unique personality,
it would be richly worth to the world all that it
has cost in money or effort.

We shall not soon look upon his like again.

UNIVERSITY RECORD

MEMORIAL ADDRESS AT DENISON UNIVERSITY'
BY RICHARD STEERE COLWELL
Professor of Greek in Denison Uniuersity

It is twenty-seven years ago last September
that I first became acquainted with President
Harper. He was at that time Principal of the
Academy here, and I had just begun my work
in Denison. And from that time to the day of
his death it was my privilege to be numbered
among his warm friends. I was then, as now,
deeply interested in the study of the Greek of
the New Testament, and he was much inter-
ested in the Hebrew of the Old Testament.
Thus it came about that there was a basis of
common interest and sympathy on which a last-
ing friendship was built. As time went on the
friendship deepened, and I can remember a
great many conversations with him, most of
them in regard to the word of God and future
work based upon it.

As I have said, he was intensely interested in
the Hebrew language and looked forward eager-
ly to an opportunity to teach it. He thought
that the language was not properly taught. He
felt certain that it could be so taught as to make
the study of it much more attractive and bene-
ficial than was then the case. And although I
had at the time learned to read it with some
facility I very willingly assisted in the forma-
tion of a class with which he proposed to try
some experiments in methods of teaching it. I
do not remember just how long I was a mem-
ber of that class, but it was long enough to give
me an experimental knowledge of President
Harper as a teacher. It has been my good for-
tune to be under the instruction of a number of
eminent teachers in this country and a few in
Germany, and I speak advisedly when I say
that President Harper was among the very best

^ This address was given at a memorial service
held in Granville, Ohio, on Sunday, January 14, 1906.

teachers of his time. He had an ability to teach
such as very few men have. He had that rare
ability of awakening enthusiasm in his pupils
for the studies they were pursuing — an ability
which no amount of mere knowledge can sup-
ply or awaken. I have known but few teachers
who could surpass him in that respect.

President Harper had many of the qualities
of a teacher which accompany this power, al-
though they do not create it. I will allude very
briefly to three of these.

In the first place, he was thoroughly informed
about the subject which he taught. It was his
delight to delve deep in its lore. He loved it.
He loved to teach it to others. It was no irk-
some task to him to spend hours in guiding oth-
ers along the road he had traveled. I remember
asking him one day if he really understood the
origin of all the peculiar forms of the language
he was so much interested in, the Hebrew, and
he replied that he thought he knew them all but
one which he mentioned, and he believed he
would soon have cleared up all his doubts
about that. He was always willing and eager
to spend all the time and labor necessary to
master his subject. And I knew no man who
could work more hours than he.

In the second place, he had an intense per-
sonal interest in his pupils. His interest was
not limited to the classroom or the subject
taught, or to the school. He was interested in
all that concerned his pupil. Although working
more hours than most men work, he was always
ready to form new classes outside of the regu-
lar hours, to help along his students. He made
each pupil to feel that he knew about him, that
he was his friend, ready to do everything in his
power to assist him. Of course, the inevitable
result of this was that he awakened an un-

UNIVERSITY RECORD

bounded enthusiasm in all who came under his
instruction.

In the third place, he had an immense driving
power among his classes. He could get more
work out of his students than any teacher I ever
knew. He made large demands upon them and
made them feel that they must meet them. He
made them feel that they wanted to meet these
demands. They wanted to do it more than any-
thing else. In fact, this went so far that I have
known his colleagues to object that he was
drawing to his work the whole working power
of his students, so that they had little left for
other studies. The students often felt that they
must get Harper's lessons before all others.
The others could take what was left.

I have called these three qualities or char-
acteristics which President Harper possessed in
a very high degree the frequent accompaniments
of great teaching power, because, although
they usually accompany it, a man may, in my
judgment, possess them all and not be a really
great teacher. In fact, some great teachers do
not possess any of them in a high degree. They
are important but not essential. They are val-
uable but not indispensable.

The one thing which made President Harper
the great teacher that he was, was his attitude
toward the truth — linguistic truth, philosophi-
cal truth, biblical truth. He was eager for it. He
wanted to possess it. He was willing to work
for it and to sacrifice for it. And more than
that, he was willing to accept it when he found
it, no matter what it was, or how it appeared.

I have known men who would work for the
truth, but who were afraid of it when they
found it. If it had any different appearance
from the truth with which they were familiar,
they were unwilling to accept it. They did not
like its unsettling effects. They could not bring
themselves to make the new adjustments which
this new truth, or new phase of truth, de-
manded. They wanted things left as they were,
as they had been accustomed to them. But
President Harper was not of this sort. He
wanted the truth, and when he found it he let
that truth have him; he let it possess him.
Other things could take care of themselves. The
truth had the right of way. Other things must
yield to it and adjust to it.

In all these respects the truth to President
Harper was not, as it is to so many, a thing of
the past ; something done up in a package with a
label on it to refer to. The truth to him was
not a dead past, but a living, present reality
and power; something that could be used, ap-
propriated, adjusted, wrought into the life of
the present. He did not despise the truth of
the past, but he was most interested in that of
the present. He was not afraid of it. He
wanted it, and he was willing to yield himself
tc its guidance. He felt safe in following it.
He did follow it with confidence. In the last
letter which I received from him, less than a
year ago, he said that he did not know what
God had in store for him, but that he should
fearlessly follow on, doing the work assigned
to him, to the end. Surely it is a worthy ex-
ample for every believer.

UNIVERSITY RECORD

MEMORIAL ADDRESS AT 'JOHN B. STETSON UNIVERSITY'
BY PRESIDENT LINCOLN HULLEY

Students and Friends: Let me fix your
minds on the purpose of this meeting. It is a
memorial service to Dr. William R. Harper,
President of the University of Chicago. By
virtue of our affiliation with Chicago he was
our President, too. Last week he said good-
bye, passed through the gates of death, and
journeyed on to the City Eternal. He died,
as he had lived, victoriously. There was no
dread of the unseen in his mind, there was no
halting doubt as to what waited him on the
morrow. The expectation of immortality,
while grounded in reasonable convictiors.
rests, in the last analysis, on faith, and he had
faith. Like Moses he walked as seeing Him
who is invisible, accepted the belief in a future
life, and ordered his life on the principle that
it was true.

This vast audience, assembled here to honor
his name, is a proof of how well known he was.
Here in Florida, he has stood on this platform
and looked into the faces of a DeLand audience,
and spoken a message of cheer. He has done
the same in many widely separated places.
The universities of this country are the symbols
of our people's highest thinking and noblest
ideals, and it is in the universities that this man
will be most honored by thinkers, investigators,
critics, by men of intellectual power and men
of action, leaders of thought, and makers of
opinion. These men will rise up all over this
land and will say that one of the most forceful,
resourceful, and fruitful men of this age was
William R. Harper.

A mighty leader has fallen. He was a prince
among his fellow men. None ever worked with
him without acknowledging his headship.

'This address was given at the memorial exer-
cises held at John B. Stetson University, DeLand,
Florida, on Sunday, January 14, 1906.

They did not always agree with him, but they
said this man can do more and do it better
than the rest of us. They never worked with
him without saying he is a tireless worker, he
toils night and day, he is perpetually planning,
daily bringing things to pass. Those who did
not agree with him would have to confess that
he had done his thinking and produced results,
while they were dreaming about it and flattering
themselves that they were right and that his
way was wrong or not so good as theirs. And
this is no reflection on any one who ever worked
with him. It was the common experience of
all. He was a mighty man of action, great in
word and deed.

Energy of character was the most conspicu-
ous trait in President Harper as I knew him.
He was a dynamo full charged. He fairly
throbbed with an excess of physical energy
in his best days. He drove his work continu-
ally. His will never balked at obstacles. His
energy of spirit attacked the day's work in a
masterful way. His sturdy will kept his tired
body at work till midnight and urged it to
its tasks again "in the early morning.

I have seen his eyes dance with enthusiasm.
He was not like other men. Other men, for
that reason, failed to understand him. I do not
mean by that that he suffered much from being
misunderstood. His admirers failed to
understand him. I have sometimes heard them
say that he did not have poise, that he was too
sanguine and allowed his feelings to run away
with his judgment. But results proved tliat he
did not.

Connected with his energy was his industry.
He was indeed an indefatigable worker.
Sitting at Dr. Harper's dinner-table once, next
to Dr. A. B. Bruce of Scotland, I heard the
latter say of Dr. Harper, "I don't believe he

UNIVERSITY RECORD

ever goes to bed. I have lived in the house with
him three months. He is always at work when
I go to bed, late or early, and he is always at
work when I arise, late or early." Once at
Chautauqua he told his Hebrew class in which
I studied, "You are neither to eat, drink, nor
sleep. You will recite three times a day, six
days a week. Study nothing but Hebrew. Go
to no side interest. Begin with the rising of the
sun Monday and stop with the chimes Saturday
night." That is the way this unusual man
worked himself, and others were willing to do
it for him.

Dr. Harper's use of time was a thing that
impressed me. He knew the value of odd
minutes. He did not lose time doing over and
over again things already done, nor idly con-
templating his achievements and flattering
himself about them. Time was too precious.
Once a thing was done he dismissed it, except
as he had to review it. On he went to new
tasks. His day was carefully planned. Office
hours, class hours, study hours, committee
meetings, were all set in order. Not a minute
went to waste. Odds and ends of time, incident
to executive work, were carefully utilized. He
has told me that many a time after his day's
work at Denison Academy was over, he would
spend the whole night in studying Hebrew.
Some of us remember reciting to him at Chi-
cago at seven in the morning, and afterward
going to our breakfast, he having had his at six.
By nine his class work was over and the day
was given to business.

Another great characteristic of Dr. Harper
was his ability to set others to work, not merely
for his own plans but for theirs. He drew
many very able young men to his side. He
energized them. They became enthusiastic
over the possibilities of a given course as he
opened it. Hundreds have felt his power in
this way. They flocked to his classes at Yale,
and in the summer schools, and later at Chi-

cago. They have gone out over the country
and still feel his powerful personality. It was
not magnetism so much as enthusiasm and
example that did it. He cast a spell over people.
They wondered and admired. Hundreds of
men in American pulpits, colleges, and divinity
schools today owe their zeal in careful Bible
study to President Harper. Through them he
reaches hundreds of others. His boys liked to
work for him. Many of them were older than
he was, but they gladly acknowledged his zeal-
ous leadership and held up his hands.

The outward facts of his life were remark-
able. At the age of nineteen, after two years
of study, he took his doctor's degree at Yale
under the famous Dr. Whitney, his thesis be-
ing a comparative study of the prepositions in
Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Gothic. He found
his earlier work at Morgan Park in teaching
Hebrew. He began to organize summer
schools for Hebrew and the Bible, and soon
had five scattered over the United States. He
wrote books, started magazines, taught even-
ing classes. He became a professor at Yale,
and there his fame grew. He was a wonderful
teacher, with a capacity for interesting people
that was unequaled.

Dr. Harper lived with a great moral pur-
pose. His dispositions of will were right. He
allied himself with good men for good works.
He daily threw his powerful influence on the
side of great ideals. He was clean in his heart
and in his speech. He worked for good causes
all the time. His nature concealed nothing.
He was true to his convictions. He had faith
in God and in his fellow men. He wrought for
lasting ends, never sparing himself. There was
nothing perverse about him, nothing cynical or
censorious. He tried to be all that he believed
in. He was cheerful, even jolly. He was kind
to every member of his classes, even to those
who might irritate him. All the while he
worked he felt guided by Divine Providence.

UNIVERSITY BE CORD

This was no abstraction to him. He had the
Hebrew idea of God as a living person. He
believed so well in God that he put himself in
harmony with Him. His purpose was to fulfil
the will of God in his own life.

President Harper has had many critics be-
cause of his alleged views of the Bible. He
knew the text of the Bible better than any one
I have ever known. He was at home in the
Hebrew text of the Old Testament, and was a
wonder to his classes in syntax as he thumbed
its pages to prove a rule of grammar. His
philological and grammatical mastery of He-
brew impressed some even more than his his-
torical or theological construction did. But
that was likely because of his method, which
was Socratic. I have known students to rail at
Dr. Harper for things he did not teach or
believe. They imputed ideas to him that he
brought out in the classroom without neces-
sarily endorsing. He presented both sides of
every question, and however radical his views
on questions of textual or historical criticism,
he always held them honestly, and just as hon-
estly believed in the essentials of salvation
taught by the Bible. His make-up was not
that of an exhorter but of the student and
scholar.

It was the Bible that made him. He loved
it above every book in the world. He knew
it better than any other book and better than
any one else that I know. He constantly
studied it and taught it. It stands to reason
that any one who will put more time on it
than others, is likely to get a different, perhaps
a better, understanding of it. He was never
its hostile critic. He opened his classes with
prayer. He never joked about the Bible, al-
ways speaking reverently about it. Nothing
interested him so much as questions about the
Bible. He devoted himself to Hebrew and
Semitic, to archeology, to excavation and dis-
covery, to providing books, magazines, a mu-

seum, chairs, and funds that would shed more
light on the Bible, and to organizing all agen-
cies that teach it; but he was deeply interested,
too, in what others were doing to rouse people
to a sense of their spiritual needs and the satis-
faction the Bible would give them.

The University of Chicago was his greatest
work. He more than once thought of his first
loves and expressed the opinion that he would
rather be known by his books than by other
things. But the University of Chicago is his
monument. As he organized Hebrew gram-
mar, so he did schools and departments. His
work at the University meant the gathering of
resources, the directing of energies, and the
starting of influences that will continue for
hundreds of years.

Everyone said he would die in middle life,
and he did. Our mortal part will not stand
such a pace. Apart from his native energy,
which urged him on, doubtless his philosophy
of life was that he should spend it to best ad-
vantage. And this he did. In his brief term
he lived a thousand years, as other men count
life. He proved that "we live in deeds, not
years, in thoughts, not breaths, in heart throbs,
not in figures on a dial." He gathered himself
together with all care and threw himself into
his work with unstinted enthusiasm. Some
people ask, did it pay? That depends on what
one is living for. Others have said, speaking
of his salary, that he was well paid. Dr.
Harper never thought of that. It didn't pay,
if money is the standard of value. Men of
Dr. Harper's class never ask that question.
He did not. He was doing a life work. He
was called to do it. He gave himself to the
doing of it, and he found life. The paradox of
life, as he knew it, is that one must give to
have, spend in order to increase, die in order
to live. He gave his life in service. He took
the risks of death as all good soldiers do, and
he met it unafraid.

VNIVEMSITY RECORD

He was great in his life and great in his
death. Knowing that the shadow was on him,
he never flinched. He did not even murmur.
He dared even greater things. Forgetting the
things that were behind at the very moment
when one might expect reminiscence, he
pressed on to the things that were before:

To feel the fog in my throat,

The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote

I am nearing the place.
The power of the night, the press of the storm,

The post of the foe.

There was for him "one fight more, the best
and the last." So he girded himself, and fought
the fight, and conquered. He grounded his
life in the Bible — in its ethics, religion, psychol-
ogy, practical wisdom and examples. He lived
much with Moses, David, Isaiah, Amos, Job,
Paul, and Jesus the Christ. He caught their
inspiration. He lived for their ideals. For his
unusual methods he was condemned sometimes
as they were. But they were in his blood, and
he died with the fortitude and moral grandeur
of the heroes of old.

■34

UNIVERSITY RECORD

ADDRESSES AT THE MEMORIAL MEETING OF THE STUDENT BODY'

ADDRESS

BY HARRY PRATT JUDSON
Dean of the Faculties of Arts, Literature, and Science

One of the most striking facts which have
come to me in my relations to Dr. Harper
is the very warm personal affection enter-
tained for him by a great number and a great
variety of men. They are men who apparently
oftentimes have not had very much in common
one with another, and yet all have this common
attachment which has bound them closely to
the President and which in turn bound him to
them. This kind of affection between men is a
matter common in your experience and in mine.
We know that ties formed among college stu-
dents in their life together are exceedingly close
and long continued, in fact, becoming some of
the most permanent and tender among the rela-
tions of life. Such affection, binding men to-
gether, peculiar in its character, is strong be-
yond any possibility of description. It is this
with which we are familiar and which we recog-
nize as a common and very interesting fact in
life. The unique thiiig with our President was,
as I have said, that this affection existed be-
tween him and so many men living under so
many different conditions and with so many
different sets of ideals.

In seeking for the causes of this very un-
usual fact I have been inclined to find them in
two things which were very highly developed
and very conspicuous in the character of Dr.
Harper. The first of these was his wide range
of sympathy with all sorts and conditions of
men. He understood men in all relations of
life and sympathized keenly with them in their
ideals and in their ambitions. He understood
the scholar and investigator. He understood
the active man of affairs. He understood the

^ These addresses were given in the Leon Man-
del Assembly Hall on Monday, January 15, 1906.

young man — the student. He understood men
in public life. He understood the warm feeling
of national patriotism. He understood the ac-
tive organized life of the young man. He was
in keen sympathy with college spirit. He was
very much interested in public education. In
fact, there was hardly a form of modern activ-
ity, wholesome in its character, with which he
was not in touch and in close sympathetic rela-
tions. This great catholicity of sympathy, ac-
companied as it was by a tender affectionate
disposition, I think is one thing that greatly en-
deared him to so many men in so many lines of
modern activity.

Another side of Dr. Harper's character
which was very obvious to all who knew him
closely, was his firm faith in the future and in
what could be done with it. Many and many
a time I have gone into his presence with some
problem, feeling doubtful and perhaps dis-
couraged, but five minutes with his great en-
thusiasm and warm faith sufficed to convert
the entire attitude of mind to one sympathetic
with his. This we call magnetism. The
foundation lies in enthusiasm, in confidence,
and in this abounding energy of his which con-
verted every plan in his mind at once into a
plan accomplished. This enthusiasm of his
was contagious, and his faith in the future and
in human possibilities became converted in
every man's mind into a similar faith and simi-
lar enthusiasm which made many things possi-
ble which otherwise would have been entirely
impossible.

We are discussing at this time the advisabil-
ity of placing in the quadrangles some stately
building which shall stand for all time as a me-
morial for our lost President. That such plan
will be carried out I confidently believe; and
yet, after all, the best memorial of Dr. Harper
which can ever exist is the University which he

UNIVERSITY RECORD

founded. We must remember, too, that the
University is not its lands, its buildings, its en-
dowments alone. The University is the entire
body of men and women, faculty and students,
who compose the University community, who
are here for the common purpose of attainment
in a high intellectual life, with the common pur-
pose of adding to knowledge by research. If
we, then, wish to do our best to keep green the
memory of the intellectual founder of the Uni-
versity, shall we not all of us. Faculty and stud-
ents alike, unite in doing the best that within
us lies to make the University all that Dr. Har-
per ever dreamed ? To that end above all things
we need to remember that we can do nothing
without unity. Let us stand by one another;
let us act as members of a common body, and let
us never forget that we are members, above
all, of the University of Chicago. And this im-
plies, in the second place, a loyalty on the part
of each one of us which will make him cheer-
fully ready to give of his time, of his efforts, of
whatever is needed to make the institution what
it should be. It is by the sacrifice of time and
thought and work that great things are accom-
plished in the world. The University can be
maintained and extended ; its life can be kept
strong and vigorous and glowing through the
years that are to come only by all of us putting
in together our best efforts, our knowledge
our life, to that end.

ADDRESS ON BEHALF OF THE DIVINITY SCHOOL

BY ERI BAKER HULBERT
Dean of the Divinity School

Not many of the students whom I address
this morning, and not all of the teaching staff,
are familiar with the circumstances under which
this University began its career, and under
which the President consented to assume the
headship. Those who are familiar with this
early history, into the details of which I need
not here enter, can well understand the grounds

of our loyalty to the University in general, and
to our departed leader in particular. Before
the doors of the institution were opened we
were pledged in advance to the support of the
main outlines of the policy which has since
been carried out. We have never had occasion
to regret these initial steps, and subsequent
events have abundantly confirmed the wisdom
of our decision.

Besides the general compact into which we
entered with the President at the beginning and
on the basis of which he accepted the responsi-
bilities of leadership, there are peculiar cir-.
cumstances in our situation as a school of theol-
ogy which bind us in loyalty to the larger
scheme of education which is here represented,
and to him whose fertile brain conceived and
created it. Our position is such, chiefly by
virtue of our connection with the University,
that we enjoy a liberty both as regards the form
and the substance of the clerical discipline
which is enjoyed by scarcely any other seminary
in the land. Encouraged by the President we
have striven to make wise use of this liberty.
In our sphere we have addressed ourselves to
the solution of many delicate and, as we be-
lieve, vitally important problems which confront
the modem religious world. Some of these
problems we think we have solved to the satis-
faction of the more intelligent members of the
various Christian communions ; others are yet
in process of solution.

It is our conviction that incalculable benefit
will accrue to the Christian world by the study
of theological science in the reverent, truth-
loving spirit, and by the accurate and painstak-
ing method that obtains in other divisions of the
University. It is by virtue of our organic
relations with these other colleges and schools
and of our participation in the scholarly, scien-
tific, and progressive spirit of our lamented
President that it is made possible to us to con-
tribute somewhat to the correcting and clarify-

UNIVERSITY RECORD

ing of current religious conceptions. In time
to come, as in time past, we shall evince our
loyalty to the established traditions of this school
of learning by pursuing steadily and intelligent-
ly the path marked out for us by the' one toward
whom our thoughts are turned today, whose
memory we shall always cherish and whose
inspiring example we shall strive to follow.

ADDRESS ON BEHALF OF THE LAW SCHOOL

Br CHARLES ANDREWS HUSTON
Of the Department of English

Of the great projects of President Harper
the Law School is among the latest realized.
But from its opening day it has felt itself, and
I think has been felt, to be an integral part of
our University. We did not need this com-
munity of sorrow to bring us all into fellowship.
We have from the very first been knit into
a common life. That this has been so, that
this feeling of ultimate participation has been
ours, is due in large part to the far-sighted pol-
icy of our dead leader. In his great decennial re-
port, in speaking of the Law School, then about
to be founded, he laid down three principles as
fundamental in its building. The very first of
these was that it should form "an organic part
of the University, making contributions to the
University life and at the same time imbibing
the spirit and purpose of that life." The history
of the last four years has proved these words
prophetic.

But even more than to this wise planning
our participation in the spirit of the University
has been due to the influence of the President's
personality, penetrating this as every relation
of the University life. Many of us now in the
Law School had in our college days learned to
know and honor President Harper. All of us,
wherever our undergraduate years were spent,
have come to recognize in his life the embodi-
ment of an ideal which seems peculiarly appro-
priate for men who will practice the profession

of law. Like the President's, our lives must
largely be spent in tasks executive, tasks which
call for the exercise of those abilities which he
so conspicuously displayed as head of our great
institution. His versatility, his inventiveness,
his ability in referring daily varying problems
to underlying principles, the promptness of his
decision, the inerrancy of his judgment — how
readily and keenly we covet these qualities for
our tasks. But we will do well to remember
that basal to the President's executive abilities
was that profound scholarship which was to
him a source not only of solace but of strength
in the thickest press of the most practical affairs.
Even more must we remember that that scholar-
ship and that executive ability were ennobled
by generous and unselfish devotion of them to
the public good.

Not the success granted to the President's
abilities, splendid as that success was, but the
cause to which those abilities were consecrated —
this it is that gives meaning and grandeur to the
President's career. If we, to the measure of our
powers, devote ourselves as unselfishly as he
to public service ; if as lawyers we conceive
ourselves as ministers of justice, as he loved to
think of himself as a priest of education, our
work will be a tribute, of the kind he would
most prize, to the University to which we owe
so much — the University which he loved so
dearly, and which owes so much to him.

ADDRESS ON BEHALF OF THE ALUMNI AND GRADUATE
SCHOOLS

By ARTHUR EUGENE BESTOR

Of the Class of 1901

General Secretary of the Alumni Association

The University of Chicago is to all of us to-
day a sad and lonesome place. To think of our
Alma Mater without our President is almost
impossible. These floral offerings, these flags
at half-mast in our city, these memorial services
all over the land, these tributes from men at
home and abroad, all testify to the fact that one

UNIVERSITY RE COED

who was to us an elder brother and a help-
ful friend was to the world at large a man of
influence and mighty power.

It is not for me to speak of our President as
a scholar, an educator, an executive, or as a
religious leader. To me is given a humbler and
yet a more congenial task. I come this morning
to speak briefly of President Harper from the
standpoint of those who have shared the in-
spiration of his life through this great institu-
tion. It matters not whether we knew him in-
timately or not. No man or woman who has
entered the halls of the University during these
fifteen years but has felt in some way the touch
of his life. How deeply he was interested in
all our student activities, how concerned he was
for all who have gone out from among us, only
his absence will reveal. For some of us his
friendship was one of the choicest privileges
of our college days, and to us his death comes
as a bitter, a personal loss. On behalf of all
the alumni and the older members of this stu-
dent body I come to lay a tribute on the bier of
our departed leader.

There has been a tendency on the part of
some to speak of our institution as "The Uni-
versity," to describe it as a material thing.
Many have told of the extent of its campus, the
amount of its endowment, the number of its
students. With the loss of the President, what
this University is and what it stands for has
been revealed as it could have been revealed in
no other way. We have begun to see how truly
this was "His University ;"and what a monu-
ment it is — not these buildings of brick and
stone, not this wide-spreading campus, but this
institution, a vital force in America's future, a
life-giving power for the centuries.

I bring to you this morning a higher concep-
tion than either of these, a conception which
I believe our President would wish to have em-
phasized by anyone who presumed to speak for
the alumni at a gathering like this. This

is "The University," it is "His University,"
but in a truer and deeper sense it is "Our
University" — his and ours. The highest
privilege that has been granted us in this
decade and a half has been the opportunity
of being co-laborers with him in building up
this institution of learning. The Trustees have
had a part, the Faculty have had a part, and we
have had a part in molding this life. We have
shared in his work, his achievements, his am-
bitions, his friendship.

Our thoughts are, therefore, toward the fu-
ture, not the past. He would have it so.
In these last days he has thought not of
what has been accomplished but what will
be brought about in the years to come.
As he lay dying on our beautiful Midway and
looked out over the beginnings — for they are
only the beginnings of this institution — he pic-
tured the University a hundred years hence.
And then he closed his eyes in the firm belief
that others would carry on the work he had be-
gun. He has gone ; the work remains. He has
laid the foundation ; ours is the task of building
thereon.

The Faculty and the Trustees will continue
his policy in the administration of this institu-
tion. Upon the alumni and students of the Uni-
versity is laid as high and holy a task. It is
for us to exemplify in the world of business
and law and politics and education and relig-
ion those qualities of character which made our
President what he was. If we can do our
work with that open-mindedness which was ever
ready to accept truth from whatever source it
came, with that optimism which made him be-
lieve in the future of the University and in the
future of every man and woman who has re-
ceived her training, and with that sublime cour-
age which made him live patiently and heroic-
ally a year after the death warrant had been
read to him — then shall we pay in some slight

UNIVERSITY RECORD

way the debt we owe to this our dear Alma
Mater — his University and ours.

Our friend, our President has left us a noble
heritage. Life with its many problems is upon
us. He still lives in our lives, our ideals, and
our ambitions. Of such a life Longfellow has
written :

Death takes us by surprise

And stays our hurrying feet;
The great design unfinished lies,

Our lives are incomplete.

But in the dark unknown

Perfect their circles seem.
Even as a bridge's arch of stone

Is rounded in the stream.

Alike are life and death.

When life in death survives,
And the uninterrupted breath

Inspires a thousand lives.

Were a star quenched on high.

For ages would its light.
Still traveling downward from the sky.

Shine on our mortal sight.

So when a great man dies.

For years beyond our ken,
The light he leaves behind him lies

Upon the paths of men.

ADDRESS ON BEHALF OF THE SENIOR COLLEGES

BY GEORGE RAYMOND SCHAEFFER

The President of our University has passed
from among us. The last rites have been cel-
ebrated, and as we are about to take up our
work again as members of the University which
he projected, created, fostered, and adminis-
tered, and to which, it may be truly said, he
gave his life blood, we are gathered here to pay
him tribute. The spirit of this occasion would
make it more accurate, no doubt, to say that we
are gathered to pledge him tribute, rather than
to pay it. The more we ponder on the life
'^f our dead benefactor the more vividly we re-

alize that anything approaching an adequate
tribute from us must consist of deeds, not of
words ; of a discharge of duty in the acts of
years, and not of mere expressions of senti-
ment. It has been fitting during the past days
of sorrow to indicate, by reverent words, the
boundless love and deep admiration we had for
him, but it is more highly fitting now to resolve
that we will lay firm hold upon the wonderful,
yet surprisingly simple, lessons of his life. It
will not be sufficient merely to acknowledge
these lessons, and this day will be of little im-
port unless it marks a determination to heed
them and to apply them to our conduct hence-
forth.

To the students of the L^niversity of Chicago
the life of President Harper ought to prove a
most powerful influence in leading us to better
and higher things, and an inspiration for at-
tainment such as we have never known in our
lives up to this time. He has clearly enunciated
his principles, and has abundantly applied and
interpreted them in his acts. His virtues were
the simple ones, the ones most worthy of emula-
tion. His precepts are concrete, and meet one
another in the appealing completeness and per-
fect harmony of his thought.

In his almost immeasurable ambition to ad-
vance the best interests of his fellow man. Pres-
ident Harper conceived and brought into exist-
ence the institution of which we are an organic
part. In the direction of its affairs he was
guided by his lofty ideals. To the accomplish-
ment of its ends he marvelously devoted his
prodigious energies. He would have it the
most potent organism for the advancement of
civilization that mankind has known. He would
have it not merely an institution of learning, but
he would have it a maker of men. And when
he closed his eyes for the last time he was happy,
for he felt assured that his plans would reach
their consummation.

If, therefore, we would render to our Presi-

UlSriVERSITY RECORD

Stf

dent a tribute at all consistent with what he has
done and desired to do for us, we will at least
give our reasonable service toward making the
University what he wished it to be. We will
contribute our best effort toward establishing
unity and harmony in our university life. To
the work that we have in hand we will give the
best that is within us. We will pledge to our
University our unswerving and undying alle-
giance and loyal support, and in so doing we
shall pledge our highest tribute to the Univer-
sity's creator.

ADDRESS ON BEHALF OF THE JUNIOR COLLEGES

Br JOHN FRYER MOULDS

It was not within the plans of Providence
that the present members of the Junior Colleges
should have the privilege of coming into that
intimate association with President Harper
which the members of the Faculty and the older
students have enjoyed. Pain and disease have
kept him from us. Yet to have been a member
of this institution during his administration is
a privilege which all of us shall cherish all
our lives. Even though during the past year
and a half h^ could not be present at many of
our meetings, we have continually felt the in-
fluence of his wonderful personality — his ener-
gy, his broad-mindedness, and his spirituality.

We owe him a great debt. We cannot repay
it all, but what we can we must. His work,
great as it is, was but the beginning of the
work he set out to do. Now he is gone from us.
His years of active service have ended. But
cannot we aid in carrying out his plans? That
is the question, fellow students, which you and
I must answer. He has sacrificed his life to
give to the world this University. Then upon
us, his beneficiaries, rests part of the responsi-
bility of fulfilling his hopes. The work which
time made him leave undone we must aid in
finishing. We have come here from all parts
of the world. It is our dutv to extend each to

our own locality those truths which we have
learned here, and thus spread abroad the spirit
of this University. Externally the institution
is judged largely by ourselves, its product, and
unless we endeavor truly to reach those stand-
ards which our President himself has set, we
are not loyal to the University.

We are here for a purpose— to gain materia]
knowledge, to learn more of the world and its
people, and if we are truly loyal we will make
thoroughness the keynote of all these endeavors.
Let us keep continually in our minds that prin-
ciple of our President, "Honor above all things,"
whether in the classroom, on the athletic field,
or in our relations with one another. These
things we can do in honor of our beloved Pres-
ident. Let us, then, honor him not only in.
tributes of bronze and marble, but also in deeds-
that will bring good and honor to his — our —
University. For he labored not that this should'
be a monument of mere buildings, but that there
should result a monument of flesh and blood —
true men and true women.

If we would honor his name, let us honor the
name of the University for which it is a syn-
onym. If we would be loyal to him, let us be
loyal to the University for which he gave his-
life. This is the tribute he would have us pay.
And, above all, let us not forget that all that
was vital in his wonderful character still lives,
and will continue to be a source of inspiration
to every seeker after truth and wisdom. Pres-
ident Harper's hope was that he might inspire
his students to do the good, the noble, and the
best that is in them, and to the attainment of
this desire we pledge our thoughts, our hearts^
and our lives.

ADDRESS ON BEHALF OF THE WOMEN OF THE
UNIVERSITY

BY EDITH BALDWIN TERRY

Our President is gone; our first and surely
our greatest — for who, following in the paths

UNIVERSITY RECORD

that he has prepared, can ever surpass him? —
has come among us, has fulfilled his mission,
and has departed again from whence he came.
Our University and our country are poorer,
but heaven is infinitely richer! We are met
this morning in this beautiful hall of his build-
ing to give some expression to the love and
sorrow pent up in the heart of every one of us.

And how can we do this ? How can we show
our sense of the privilege granted us in that
we have known him? Years hence, men shall
set foot upon this campus and shall still feel
the touch of a mighty personality, the presence
of a great character. But they can never know
him as we have known him. Around us stands
the "City Gray" which he gave his life in build-
ing. What more splendid monument could
stand for the life of any man!

Yet greater, even, more far-reaching and en-

during, is the monument of love reared in the
heart of every one of his students. These gray
walls may crumble and decay and the whole
University be changed, but the stamp of his
life upon ours can never fade. And we can
make this ever brighter by dedicating our lives
to those same noble principles and ideals that
guided his.

Lives of great men are the inheritance of
a nation. What a priceless inheritance is given
this University in the life of our President.
And it is for us to guard his memory, and to
hand down that inheritance, so that coming gen-
erations can say with us:

Thou'rt gone, the abyss of heaven

Hath swallowed up thy form; yet on our very heart

Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given

And shall not soon depart.

UN'IVERSITY RECORD

MEMORIAL EXERCISES OF

A LETTER FROM PRESIDENT HARPER TO THE SECRE-
TARY OF THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION OF THE
OLD UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

New Haven, Conn., February i6, 1891.
Mr. E. A. Biizzell, Chicago, III.

My dear Sir: Your kind invitation to be
present at the banquet and reunion of the
Alumni Association of the University of Chi-
cago has been received. It is a source of sincere
regret that previous engagements forbid my
acceptance of the same. I should have deemed
it a most fortunate circumstance if I could
have joined you on this occasion.

My personal relations with so many of the
alumni of the old institution make me feel
sometimes as if I were one of them, and I
suppose that my interest in the new University
of Chicago draws me all the more closely to the
alumni of the old University. I wish I could
describe the extreme satisfaction it gave me
as a member of the Board of Trustees, to vote
for the resolutions which are to be read to you
at this meeting, adopting all graduates of the
old University as alumni of the new, and re-
newing the degrees conferred upon them. This
action of the new Board shows, I am confident,
its hearty interest in the past and all that was
connected with that past. We trust that the
feeling of interest may be reciprocated and that
you will pledge your loyalty to the new insti-
tution as your alma mater.

No harm will be done, I am sure, in saying
to you that my formal acceptance of the presi-

THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION'

dency of the University of Chicago is in the
hands of the Secretary of the Board of Trus-
tees, and that my face is turned toward Chicago.
It has been a long struggle with me to decide
this question, but it is at last decided and I
believe decided .rightly. May I not hope that
the alumni of the old institution, one and all,
will join hands with me in the effort to build
in Chicago a university of which not only
Chicago but America shall be proud? The
history of the old University in spite of its
misfortunes is to me evidence that such a thing
is possible. The new interest aroused in the
work, wdthin the city and abroad, convinces
me beyond a doubt that if harmony prevails and
God assists, the result within ten years will
surpass all our expectations. Again I say,
shall we not join hands, the old and the new,
and, forgetting that there has been a break of
five years, push forward with all possible zeal.

Hoping that in due time I may become per-
sonally acquainted with every alumnus of the
old University, I remain

Yours very sincerely,
(Signed) William R. Harper.

N.B. — ^At such a time who can forget our
old friend, Professor Olson. Oh, that he were
here to see what is being done and to take part
in the new work.

^ Held in the Leon Mandel Assembly Hall on
Sunday, January 28, 1906. Mr. William Otis Wil-
son, Ph.B., of the class of 1897, presided. Judge
Frederick A. Smith, of the class of 1866, made the
opening address. The letter from President Harper
to Mr. Edgar A. Buzzell, A. B., of the class of 1886,
secretary of the Alumni Association of the old Uni-
versity of Chicago, was read by Mr. Arthur Eugene
Eestor, A. B., of the class of 1901, general secretary
of the Alumni Association of the University.

THE PRESIDENT AND THE STUDENTS OF THE
UNIVERSITY

BY WILLIAM SCOTT BOND, PH.B.
Of the Class of 1897

Ours is the loss of a great family. Our
President, the head of our family, has been
taken, and we are gathered to honor his mem-
ory. Our bereavement is a great personal
sorrow as well as a realization of the loss of
our University, our city, and our nation.

It is this personal sorrow of which I wish to
speak especially. Knowing that each of us

UNIVERSITY RECORD

zealously guards a vivid memory of our
President's personality, knowing how many of
us have experienced his personal interest and
have felt his kindly influence, I feel that it is
especially fitting in our gathering today to
express to one another our appreciation of a
personal love and to realize mutually that we
have lost one who took a deep personal interest
in all of us.

In the purpose of recalling such a personality
I may well hesitate to find words which will
be in entire sympathy with your memories. It
is just this personal relationship with our
President which is our most precious memory
and which is most difficult to describe. We
all have experienced his interest and kindness,
especially, perhaps, those of us who were here
in the first years of the University. As the
years passed the demands upon the President's
energy and time became more and more in-
sistent, but we were constantly made aware of
his unfailing solicitude both for the students
and the alumni.

We are blessed with the memory of a kindly,
courteous gentleman, overburdened with cares
and duties, who still always found time for an
interest in each of the students of the Univer-
sity and an effort to come into personal contact
with them.

We all know how cordial a welcome was
assured us when we went to him, whether in
the service of the University or for our personal
needs. We know what a ready response met
our advances. We remember how quick he
was to see an injustice, and to find a remedy ;
how any unfairness aroused his instant indig-
nation.

We recall the weekly meetings with the
graduating class, the President's earnest talk,
the confidence shown in explaining the plans
and policy of the University, and the kind
questions and suggestions as to what should
follow the University life. It is difficult to

realize that the head of a great university took
so much pains to become our friend and adviser.
As we responded then, so we grieve now.
And it was in those well remembered moments
when the relationship of president to student
had faded into that of friend and counselor,
that we could best understand his indomitable
courage, his kindly nature, and the ability to
make us all feel his enthusiasm as an irresistible
force.

While we as alumni may recognize, with
others, our President's greatness as a scholar,
as a teacher, as an organizer, and as a great
national force, and feel an inexpressible pride
and thankfulness in the magnitude of his ac-
complishment, we cannot fail to express our
love for the man himself and to acknowledge
our privilege in having been permitted to live
in the atmosphere of his faith and enthusiasm.

We yield to no one in pride in his career ;
we know what wonderful plans have been
carried to accomplishment ; we realize as fully
as may be the loss which has come to our Uni-
versity and the cause of education ; but in this
meeting today we especially mourn the loss of
our teacher and friend.

It is my wish to express as earnestly as I
may, for you all and for myself, our reverence
for our President's memory and our sense of
personal bereavement.

Off. HABPER IN THE EARLY DAYS OF THE UNIVERSITY

JAMES PRIMROSE WHYTE, A.M.
Of the Class of 1896

If Dr. Harper did not offer, each morning,
the prayer of Stevenson, he lived it throughout
every da}'. "Give us to go blithely about our
business. Help us to play the man. Help us
to perform the petty round of irritating con-
cerns and duties with laughter and kind
faces." In the early days of the University,
Dr. Harper was everywhere and to everyone an
inspiration. If he worried, he never showed his

UNIVERSITY RECORD

worry to his students. When the clouds hung
close to the earth and despondency came to
every heart, he with his kindly, beaming face
threw sunshine into our lives and gave us
strength to go on with our work. He was

One who never turned his back, but marched breast

forward ;
Never doubted clouds would break;
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong

would triumph ;
Held we fall to rise; are baffled to fight better.

Sleep to wake.

That courage helped us to hold up our
heads and go forward, to lift every obstacle
from the road and to smile as we went about
our work.

Dr. Harper was zealous in helping his stu-
dents to lay well the foundations for the
traditions of the University. His attendance
at the volunteer activities of the men was con-
stant and cheering. He was a good listener.
The interest that his intense attention revealed
was an inspiration to a speaker and it brought
out the best that there was in the man. Where
he found the time to attend our meetings, we
could not imagine. He was there and all there,
not indifferent or listless but the most eager to
catch every word and to appreciate every
point.

He had a serious concern for the fair fame
of the University. A certain man, more notor-
ious than famous, was asked to preside at one
of our intercollegiate debates. When our
President heard of it, he called in the executive
committee of the Oratorical Association and in
his quiet, kindly, tactful way advised us to
change our plans, giving as his reason that no
man honored the University by appearing in
any of its activities, but that the University
honored him ; and therefore, he knew, if we
looked at the question in his light, that ar-
rangements could be made to cancel the
engagement. Of course, he was right. The

men thought that some cheap advertising
could be given the University by having our
notorious chairman talked about, but Dr. Har-
per's timely and wise counsel kept us from
making the serious blunder. He kept his hand
on the helm and steered his students clear of
many a reef.

In the early days, we saw more of our
President and had the rich privilege of attend-
ing his classes. He stamped every student
who listened to him with the deep conviction
that here was a man who lived what he taught.
His eyes were not iixed close to a manuscript,
but full upon his class. As he unfolded the
interpretation of the prophecies in the Old
Testament concerning the Christ, his eyes
flashed full with light and his voice trembled
with intense conviction. What an impression
the evolution of the prophetic idea made upon
us ! From the germ thought that the seed of
the woman should bruise the serpent's head
to the "man of sorrows acquainted with grief,"
we were led into a revelation of a stronger,
more wonderful Christ. Perhaps when our
beloved President, in his last days lay waiting
for the personal, perfect appearance of the
.Son of God, he, with Tennyson, could
murmur :

Sunset and evening star.

And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar.

When I put out to sea.

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam.
When that which drew from out the boundless deep

Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,

And after that the dark !
And may there be no sadness of farewell.

When I embark;

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crost the bar.

UNIVERSITY RECORD

He knew the Christ foretold in the Old
Testament; he walked with Him in fancy
through the streets of Jerusalem and along the
roads of Judea and sat with Him by Galilee;
he knew him by personal experience and con-
fided to Him his plans and hopes. But now he
has a clearer vision, for, "when He shall appear,
we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as
He is."

Mr. Bond has already spoken to you of the
weekly meetings between the President and his
Senior class. Weary at the week's end, he
met us and told of his experiences in building
up the University. The little secrets of the
business that sapped his vitality, the trials that
he had with men, his reverses and his victories
— he told us all ; and being taken into the con-
fidence of the master builder we realized that
we were part and parcel of the University that
was soon to be our alma mater, and that our
allegiance to her because of these conferences
would be stronger and fuller.

Fellow alumni: our revered President has
left us a rich legacy. He gave us, not these
acres, not these buildings, not instruction, not
culture, but himself. He is the Little Father of
our Higher Life. And to thee, Alma Mater,
we shall owe a more loyal devotion because of
his passing into thy trees, and walls, because
of his entering into the web and the woof of
thy life. You may bury his body here in the
centre of the campus "where the sound of those
he wrought for, and the feet of those he fought
for echo round his bones forevermore," but his
life comes into full power in the hearts and lives
of the men and women whom he fed and led.
We, his children of the outer circle, offer our
heartfelt devotion and sympathy to his family,
the inner circle of his life; and with them we
look up and pray:

We have but faith : we cannot know ;

For knowledge is of things we see ;

And yet we trust it comes from thee,
A beam in darkness : let it grow.

DR. HARPER: HIS LIFE A MESSAGE TO US

BY MAUDE TORRENCE CLENDENINQ. PH.B.
Of the Class of 1904

We are gathered here today in the sunset
glory of a master life. In the sacred hush that
covers all, we pause to see not alone the glories
of the sunset, but the brightness of the noontime
of his life. Let us recall the elements in his life
to which we now pay tribute.

Scholarship, in the philosopher's role, has
claimed him for its guild, and laid its laurel on
his bier. As a scholar, Dr. Harper held an un-
disputed place, and we cannot but be thrilled
with admiration for his soldierly devotion to this
line of his work, even in his last hard days.

Theology has claimed him as a member of
its cult, and brought its offering. As a preacher,
Dr. Harper was a world-wide champion of
truth and right. He was one of those men who
taught and lived the same high principles of life.
When we think of the life he lived and of the
influence it must have exerted, we are reminded
of the words of Lowell :

Be noble! And the nobleness that lies
In others, sleeping, but never dead.
Will rise in majesty to meet thine own.

Education has numbered him among its
brotherhood, and has paid its tribute. In this
realm. Dr. Harper was one of the world's path-
finders. This great university stands as a monu-
ment to the fact that he was ever inspired by the
ruling idea that the broadest education alone
can give the greatest potency to a man's possi-
bilities.

Organization has recognized him as a master,
and has paid its highest respects. The unique
place which Dr. Harper will always hold in the
memory of this people will, perhaps, be due
more than to anything else to his wonderful gift
of achievement. To him was given the oppor-
tunity to accomplish great results, but oppor-
tunity alone could have accomplished but little
had it not been joined with the greatest effici-
ency. The immensity of his plans continually

UNIVERSITY RECORD

amazed us all. He was a man with a new hori-
zon every week.

But today we do not bring tribute to Dr. Har-
per as a scholar, nor as a theologian, nor as a
professor, nor as an organizer. We come to
pay our tribute to him as a man and a friend.

One of the things which we all remember so
well about Dr. Harper was his graciousness of
manner, and the cordiality and the personal ele-
ment in his handshake. Helen Kellar, in her
Story of My Life, says: "The touch of one
hand may seem an impertinence, while that of
another is like a benediction. I have met people
so empty of joy that, when I clasped their frosty
finger tips, it seemed as if I were shaking hands
with a northeast storm. Others there are whose
fingers have sunbeams in them; their grasp
warms my heart."

The one element in his character which fir.st
of all impressed everyone who knew Dr. Har-
per, everyone who met him, everyone who heard
him speak, was his absolute sincerity ; for it was
not a surface sincerity, but the very essence of
his nature, the soil out of which grew his sim-
plicity, his earnestness, and his consecration.

When we realize that there has passed out
from among us a life so good, so strong, so
true, our consolation must come in the belief
in the immortality of influence. Let me quote
the words of another: "The law of the con-
servation of energy is found in the spiritual as
well as in the material universe. No true
minstrel ever swept the strings of poesy in
vain. The harpist and the harp may perish,
but the song once sung pulsates forever. No
true artist ever dies. The marble may crumble,
the pillar may totter, the dome collapse, and the
light fade from the canvas ; but the ideas thus
conceived and imaged in color, or imprisoned
in marble, entering the world's heart, become a
live force, which shall operate even when this
old planet reels in her orbit."

The nation today puts another headstone on

the burying ground of fame; the University
mourns the loss of the man who had so large a
part in its creation ; we, all of us, grieve over the
death of a friend, but, through it all, eternity
draws nearer.

Dr. Harper has left us all a message ; his Hfe
was his message. His life was an epistle writ-
ten in language so clear and strong that it could
not be misunderstood.

I am going to close with the words of Dr.
Harper himself — words which he once used at
the funeral of my brother. "Every life is a
message sent directly from heaven for those
with whom it is to come into contact. The di-
vine hand prepares the message, and it is al-
ways complete, for no message from God ever
stops in the middle of a sentence. When the
message has been delivered, there is nothing
more for the life to do and, rightly, its end
comes. As time passes, the message will trans-
form itself into a poem, more and more beauti-
ful, more and more perfect, a precious memory
to be guarded and cherished in loving hearts."

PRESIDENT HARPER'S RELATION TO EDUCATION

BY FLORENCE HOLBROOK
Of the Class of 1879

The life and work of a truly great man fasci-
nate us. Every word, habit, act, and desire is
scanned and debated. Most great men we know
could have been great in many ways ; Dr. Har-
per would have been a man of mark in any line
of activity he had chosen. That he did not de-
vote his energy to building up a vast fortune, to
organizing a great commerical enterprise — yes,
even to the accomplishment of his heart's desire,
the work of pure scholarship — is a matter of
sincerest congratulation for us and for the
great world.

To organize an army, to control political
conditions, or to explore unknown continents
demands intellect and will and power of high
order, but nowhere, in no department of human

UNIVERSITY RECORD

endeavor, is there more need of consummate
talent, of genius, than in the educational ad-
vancement of the race.

To be a famous scholar, an authority in some
department of knowledge, to be the president of
a university, or to have succeeded in any one
of the many separate lines so happily combined
in President Harper's experience, would satisfy
most men. But his vitality was so abundant, his
intellect so powerful, his will so masterful, his
sympathies so profound, his intuition so sensi-
tive, that he could concentrate his whole intel-
lectual life upon the phase of life and work then
claiming his attention, so that he made it wholly
his own — he understood, he conquered all dif-
ficulties, and illumined the subject whether it
were an obscure text, a plan for a building, or
an educational policy. Much has been written
and said in praise of his scholarship, his ability
as an organizer, and his influence over men, but
nowhere did he show his broad view of educa-
tion, his catholicity and enthusiasm, to a greater
degree than in his interest in elementary and
secondary education — in the time and study we
devoted to the understanding of conditions, and
to what he considered the remedies and im-
provements necessary and desirable.

He early saw that if the University was to
do the best work for men and women, fhe edu-
cation of pupils in the secondary schools, high
schools and academies, was of vital importance.
The conferences between the faculties of these
schools and the University faculties were of
far reaching influence. He grew more and
more democratic. His work as a member of
the Board of Education and chairman of the
Educational Commission appointed by Mayor
Harrison was most important. His advocacy
of vacation schools, of the parental schools, of
the continuous sessions of night schools, of
playgrounds, of all kinds of handwork which
experience should prove valuable, of the kinder-
gartens, gymnasiums, school libraries, the use

of public school buildings as social centers, and
of the education of adults engaged in daily work
through university extension lectures and cor-
lesppndence, all proved his wide sympathies
and democratic tendencies.

"Where there is no vision the people perish."
Dr. Harper had the vision of the prophet, the
poet, and the artist — ^visions of beauty and ideals
of excellence constantly beckoned him on.
Great as were his accomplishments, his imagina-
tion led him to form greater ideals. His influ-
ence on all schools, on all teachers, on the public
generally, is immeasurable. Everywhere his
name stands for initiative, for application, for
scholarship, for aspiration, for character. He
leaves the greatest legacy to the world whose
influence has been to open, to the individual,
avenues for fuller expression, for richer life. I
shall never forget the last time I talked with Dr.
Harper — at Asbury Park at the meeting of the
National Educational Association last July. A
great power he had been for years in all their
councils ; he had been mentioned by every one
with tender regret and profound admiration
for the bravery he had shown. All unexpect-
edly he appeared at the meeting of the Illinois
delegation. The greetings were tremulous on
our part, but he cheered us all with assurances
of returning strength.

The scene was one that clings to the memory,
for we knew that great as was his scholarship,
unique as was his power to organize and exe-
cute, ripe as was his experience, higher than
these, the gift of enthusiasm, the power to en-
dure, the radiance of the spirit so evident in him
that day were the qualities that made the man
we loved. How beautiful it is to believe that all
these immortal qualities have but moved on to
greater opportunity, to richer fruition ! His in-
fluence and teachings here depend much upon
us. How are we to prove ourselves the stronger
and abler for his life and lessons ? By developing
to the fullest every -power for good within our

UNIVERSITY RECORD

own natures and by giving to all we meet the
freedom and power to be and to do ; never set-
ting a limit to the growth of the spirit, using
our strength as he used his, ungrudgingly, in
furthering educational ends which we deem
worthy.

His was a policy like fate

That shapes today for future hours;

The sovran foresight his to draw

From crude events their settled law —

To learn the soul and turn the weight

Of human passions into powers.

His was the mathematic might

That moulds results from men and things ;

The eye that pierces at a glance,

The will that wields all circumstance.

The starhke soul of force and light

That moves eterne on tireless wings.

DR. HARPER AS A TEACHER

BY THEODORE GERALD SOARES, PH.D.. 7894
Professor of Homhetics in the Divinity School

We cannot fail to be impressed by the dif-
ference between our gathering today and that
occasion, which none of us who were present
will ever forget, in this same room a fortnight
ago. Then the sense of sorrow was struggling
with the sense of victory. We have not for-
gotten our sorrow, but victory is victor. It is
not the mere healing of time. It is the cer-
tainty that came to the disciples of Jesus — "He
is not here ; he is risen !"

Today, therefore, we are not come to
mourn, but to give thanks that God gave to us
a great leader. Lovingly, we are met to re-
count v/hat he was to us ; trustingly, we rec-
ognize that he has been called to higher service.

It is the grateful task of one who was in
nearly all the President's classes in the first
two years of the University to speak of him as
a teacher.

It may not be generally recognized, but it is
unquestionably a fact, that the very highest
qualities of a teacher can only be brought into
exercise in the teacher of religion. There are

certain important characteristics that are re-
quired in any great teacher. It needs not to
say that Dr. Harper possessed these in a super-
eminent degree. Profound, accurate, and ever
widening scholarship, love of learning, love of
men, and love that men shall learn, a recogni-
tion of truth as more precious than rubies and
more to be desired than fine gold, a longing to
share the truth with all others, tact and stimu-
lus and leadership — all these qualities were his
and in them all among teachers he was facile
princeps. But more than all was a fine quality
of sympathy in the teaching of a subject which
demands that quality above all else.

The subjects of divinity share with all
sciences the common difficulties. Every teacher
must find his student on his lower intellectual
level. He must lead him to an understanding
of processes and methods. The scientific and
historical point of view the student only
reaches under a master's guidance. But the
teaching of the Bible and the subjects of the
christian religion presents a wholly unique dif-
ficulty. The student is not only ignorant, un-
trained, immature, rude of grasp, as in any
sphere of learning, but he is fortified in pre-
judice. I wish that word could be used without
offense. I mean simply that the student has
prejudged the results of his study. All the
sanctity of parental instruction, all the influ-
ences of the teaching of his church, that funda-
mental basis of eternal and inevitable truth, as
he conceives it, upon which the whole strticture
of his thinking is reared, have furnished him
before entering the classroom of the biblical in-
structor a set of certain opinions which he would
change at his peril, nay, which it may be almost
a sacrilege to re-examine. Therein lies the del-
icate and difficult task of the teacher of relig-
ion. If it is not quite so delicate nor so diffi-
cult as it was twenty, fifteen, or a dozen years
ago, the difference is largely due to the influ-
ence of Dr. Harper.

UNIVERSITY RECORD

His quality as a teacher appeared when he
met a class in the study of the Old Testament
prophets. In many respects the study is parallel
with that of the Attic orators. There is a dead
language which, through the process of earnest
study, must live. There is an old history into
which the student must transport himself un-
til the burning words of the orator have the fire
and passion of contemporary speech. There
are critical, textual, literary problems which
must be solved by closest investigation. He must
be a master who will lead a student really to ap-
preciate Demosthenes or Isaiah. But there is
this difference. The Greek student is a classi-
cist, the Hebrew student is a preacher. The
primary, practical, immediate question with the
student of the Hebrew prophets is, what kind
of a gospel shall he have to preach to the twen-
tieth century. He had a gospel before he began
to study, and it was all bound up with certain
conceptions of the Testament religion. It was
dependent on a certain view of what the dreams
and ideals of the prophets meant. The change
of a tense meant the change of a theology.
Therein lay the problem of the earnest teacher
of the Bible.

I do not speak theoretically. I knew a lad
brought up after the straitest sect of the earn-
est, pious, devoted literalists. He had passed
through college and come into the modern world
of thinking upon all subjects save religion. As
some men with marvelous ingenuity keep asun-
der religion and business, so he held the modern
world. He wished they would stop explora-
tions in Babylonia. One never could tell what
might be dug up that would be disquieting and
would give aid and comfort to the enemies of
the faith. He was going to be a minister of the
gospel. He was intending to preach divine
truth for the good of men in the modern world.
And he would have preached it that the seven-
teenth century might have called him brother.
He heard a series of discourses, simple, clear

as the sunlight, profound, suggestive of possi-
bilities of knowledge all unseen, winning, invit-
ing, illuminating, bringing the Hebrew prophets
of twenty-five hundred years ago into relation
with reality. The young disciple had an inter-
view with the great master and decided, God
helping him, and under the leadership of the
man with whom he utterly disagreed, but in
whom he inevitably believed, to work the matter
through to the end. That young man was good
material for either a bigot or a skeptic. It was
the fine sympathy, at once an intellectual and
spiritual sympathy, of the master teacher that
led him through the twilight of a long investi-
gation into the sunlight of God's eternal day.

I have seen biblical teachers smile at the per-
plexity of students. Never Dr. Harper. To him
the passage of the mind from traditionalism to
freedom was a sacred progress. He knew all
the dangers and the fears and he knew the way
to victory, and with rare tact and courage led
us on. Because we felt his sympathy and knew
that he understood the struggle and brought us
into it only that he might bring us through it,
we became his willing disciples and dared to
think because he dared. Without irreverence I
may paraphrase a great word. We had not a
high priest who could not be touched with the
feeling of our infirmities, but was in all points
tested like as we were, yet without failure.
It was that strong assurance that made a
generation of christian scholars, teachers, and
preachers.

Dr. Harper founded a school of thought — not
the school we see about us, but that whole com-
pany of men and women throughout the world
whom he taught to read the old scriptures with
insight and joy and absolute faith. Insight, for
it was his mission, gladder than that of his fav-
orite prophet, to teach men that having eyes
they should see, and having ears they should
hear, and having hearts they should understand.
Joy, as ~-eat moral truths first enunciated in

UNIVERSITY RECORD

Israel, became real and vital for our day and
generation. Faith, yes faith. It was the teach-
er's noblest gift to his students. Of course, if
faith means an unchanged adherence to a set
of opinions, then the experiences of Dr. Har-
per's classroom often shattered it. But if faith
means that there is one God, the same yester-
day, today, and forever, and that this world is
God's world, and that men may dare to think
God's thoughts after him and may reverently
and earnestly ask questions, and ask them again,
and ask them again, sure that at the end of any
earnest path of inquiry they shall never find a
lie,

That right is right, since God is God,

And right the day will win ;
To doubt would be disloyalty.

To falter would be sin —

if it is faith that the soul rests confident in
the integrity of the universe, then was our great
teacher the man of faith, and his disciples fol-
lowed him.

Dr. Harper was not the first to teach scien-
tifically the Old Testament. He was too young
to be a pioneer in modern religious thinking.
He was not the only man of his generation who
believed that it was safe to let the people know
the truth. He was only one in the extraordinary
galaxy of biblical scholars that has distin-
guished the last thirty years. His supreme
place was that of the teacher, and the remark-
able advance of biblical and Semitic study in
America, which he effected, came through his
ability as a teacher. He spoke today in ten
thousand pulpits and in ten thousand bible
classes, even from the lips of men who never
knew him. And so the teacher lives in the mes-

sages of other teachers and preachers — mes-
sages in his own spirit, strong, brave, fair, with
never a sneer nor a gibe, with no hot argument
nor noisy stage play ; for he helped us under-
stand the promise of the Supreme Teacher, "Ye
shall know the truth, and the truth shall make
you free."

RESOLUTIONS IN MEMORY OF PRESIDENT HARPER'

The Alumni of the University of Chicago, in
special memorial service assembled, January
28, 1906, would testify to the great loss we
sustain in the death of our President.

William Rainey Harper has been to us the
prophet of an educational movement which de-
manded clear-cut pursuit of fundamental truth.
Recognizing the many-sidedness of life and the
unity of all truth, he became a leader of men
who encouraged research in every department
of knowledge. He was broad-mmded, earnest,
brave, and true; comprehensive and clear of
plan; convincing of presentation; and swift of
execution. He laid hold on the past of the hu-
man race, wrought wonderfully in the present,
and, like a prophet, brought the future before
us.

Dr. Harper was far more to us than Presi-
dent. He was our guide, our friend, our elder
brother. We have worked with him and have
come to love him. His memory will ever in-
spire us to make all life greater, more beautiful,
m.ore abundant.

With a deep sense of personal loss we extend
to his bereaved family our heartfelt sympathy.

^ These resolutions were read by Mr. Allen T.
Burns, A. B., of the class of 1898.

UNIVERSITY RECORD

PRESIDENT HARPER AND HIS LIFE WORK'

BY JOHN HUSTON FINLEY

President of the College of the City of New York

The facts which give outhne to this remark-
able life are these: He was born in 1856 of
Scotch-Irish ancestry in a small Ohio town ; he
entered the preparatory department of a small
college in that same town at the age of eight,
and was graduated from college when only four-
teen years old. He worked for three years,
studying meanwhile privately, and then, enter-
ing the graduate department of Yale University,
took his doctorate in Semitic languages at the
age of nineteen. He was married in the same
year, and at once began teaching in the South ;
then he was principal of a preparatory school in
connection with Denison University, Ohio. In
1879, when twenty-three years of age, he be-
came professor of Hebrew in what was then the
Chicago Baptist Union Theological Seminary
at Morgan Park, 111. Nine years later he went
to Yale University as professor of Semitic lan-
guages, and soon after was made professor of
biblical literature. In those years he became
deeply interested in the Chautauqua movement
of popular education, and was chosen head of
the Chautauqua College of Liberal Arts. In
189 1 he went back into the West again, this time
as president of the University of Chicago and
its head professor of Semitic languages and
literatures, and there remained to the day of his
death, January 10, 1906. During all these years
William Rainey Harper was continuing his
study in the field of his early choice, writing
textbooks and articles, and associating others
with him in his productive scholarly work.

These facts, out of the ordinary in them-
selves, are especially remarkable in their se-
quence and association only. That a boy born
in 1856 should in 1864 be entering upon his col-

' Reprinted, by permission, from the February
(igo6) number of the Review of Reviews.

lege preparatory work is most unusual. (The
average boys of today, whatever the cause may
be, are but getting fairly under way with their
reading and writing and arithmetic at eight.)
That this same boy should be graduated from
college, competent, as has been reported, to
make his commencement address in Hebrew, is
another unusual if not phenomenal fact, — a fact
which gives rise to further questioning as to
whether some youths, at least, are not encour-
aged or required to spend more time than they
ought in acquiring the disciplines and knowl-
edges of the college curriculum.

I do not know what the standards of Muskin-
gum College, his Alma Mater, were in 1864;
but, even if its curriculum carried the student
no farther than the courses of our present
sophomore year, it yet appears that after two
years of residence in Yale he was able to gain
the doctor's degree at an age scarcely above
that of the average sophomore of today, whose
immaturity has invited general remark. It is
interesting to note, in this connection, that in
the University of Chicago, under the direction
of this boy grown to man, it has been made
possible for students to progress to the bache-
lor's degree in even three years or less from
matriculation.

The experience of this one Ohio boy has been
very effective in its influence on what he calls
an educational fetich, — the four-year college
course.

It was, doubtless, much easier thirty years
ago for one who had a special aptitude in lan-
guages to secure his degree in the phenom-
enally short time spent by Dr. Harper in win-
ning his, for language work filled a ver>' large
part of the curriculum, but one who knows what
Dr. Harper's wonderful energy was, must be-

WILLIAM RAINEY HARPER

UNIVERSITY RECORD

lieve that he would probably have mastered a
curriculum of sciences in as brief a time, so
eager was his mind for mastery. I was shocked,
though I was interested, to know from his own
lips, soon after the first attack of the fatal dis-
ease, how thoroughly he had mastered the liter-
ature of that disease and its treatment. This I
speak of because I believe it was so indicative
of the conquering spirit of the man.

The period of his active work after this phe-
nomenally early preparation was only thirty
years, including the first few years of appren-
ticeship and the year at the end of his life,
which was as a year of resurrection — a year of
return to the earth. But the achievement of
these three decades, begun at an immature age
and crowned with the glory of the heroic strug-
gle of the last year, was the achievement of
three men, and of three extraordinary men. It
was as if these three men of the same basic char-
acter, having all much in common and having
each a sympathy with the others, yet differing in
their possessing interests and their intellectual
gifts, were joined together in a loyal and en-
during union. The great bounding heart was
common to all. And they all worked together
always. Only they divided their time among
the interests of these three giant men. Now it
was teaching to which he gave himself with the
strength of three men ; another hour or another
day it was to study, to the seeking of a scholar ;
and then the next hour or the next day it was
the complex and tangled task of the executive
to which this man of three men's brains set his
hand. By this co-operation he accomplished
what three men working independently, though
of great ability each, could not have done. It
seems as if nature had here exhibited in human
life the wisdom of combination and had given
example of economy in the diversity of interest
and effort.

The triple accomplishment of this life has been
so often in these past few months recited in its

detail that it cannot be necessary to repeat it
here. The story is known upon the street as
well as in classroom and study. It must here
suffice to say a word out of my own observation
and affection, of that achievement.

I have said elsewhere that he was first of all
a teacher. I have been reading today that one
who stood nearest to him of all, perhaps, in his
university work, and who knew perhaps better
than any one else his achievement as an execu-
tive, put the teaching man in him first, too. Of
course, it is less possible to estimate accurately
that service than to assess the results of scholar-
ship or the tangible creations of the executive.
Dr. Harper is certainly to be put among the
first few of our great teachers, and possibly of
the teachers of the world. He has been a later
Abelard, attracting scholars and students from
all parts of this country to a place remote from
the older seats of learning. He went out to
v/hat was, in the eastern imagination, a wilder-
ness, but scholars and students followed him,
and many of them would willingly, had it been
necessary, have made the sacrifices and endured
the hardships of the old students of Abelard, to
be near him. Dean Judson said that at one
time he seemed to think it his mission to set all
the world to studying Hebrew, and that, under
the magnetism of his teaching, it really appeared
as if it might be done. With Abelard, it was
theology. With Harper, it was Hebrew. The
great inspiring teacher was there in both cases.
It mattered little what the subject was.

Upon his achievement as a productive scholar
I cannot dare to set my own valuation. It is
reported that he said shortly before his end that
he would rather have produced his book
on the "Minor Prophets" than to have been
university president for forty years. Shortly
after the death sentence came to him, I saw him
one memorable afternoon last spring at Lake-
wood. He knew that he had but a year at
most to live, in all probability, and he kept ask-

UNIVERSITY RECORD

ing me, or rather himself m my presence, to
which of his tasks he should give those last
months. He was practically barred from the
first, his teaching; but should he complete or
attempt to complete the series of books on the
Old Testament which he was writing, or should
he bring nearer to completion his great plans
for the university which he had builded? I
think he found himself inclined to do the for-
mer, and this seemed to me the proper appraise-
ment of the relative importance of the two great
tasks that were left to his attempting.

But whatever our estimates may be of the
value of his teaching and of his scholarship, he
is to be best remembered by his work as presi-
dent of the university. This is to be his lasting
monument, for it seems firmly established as one
of the world's great universities. Wherein the
great executive skill lay which evolved that it
is difficult to discover. He had no great mag-
netism of personality except to those who came
close to him, who knew him intimately. He had
no grace of speech. He had none of the persua-
sive powers of the orator. But there was in
him some subtle power beyond analysis.

The chemists have recently come upon a proc-
ess new to them, — upon substances which have
commanding power over other substances in
their presence, transforming them without self
change, without any seeming expenditure or loss
of energy in themselves. The merest trace of
one of these "catalysts," as they are named, may
suddenly "let loose the powerful affinities" of a
substance before insoluble. And so incommen-
surate do the cause and effect sometimes seem,
that one author has likened the process to the
dissolving of an island by throwing a few hand-
fuls of crystals upon it. There was a trace of
something in President Harper which let loose
powerful affinities between men and their
wealth, and led them to form new and unselfish
affinities ; which made soluble minds and hearts
that had never before yielded to high appeal.

This is not demeaning his personal qualities ; it
is only saying that there was a trace of some-
thing added to those qualities which can be
analyzed and assessed and catalogued.

Though President Harper's wisdom in cer-
tain aspects came out of the East, he was in
spirit a Westlander. He did what seemed im-
possible to do, and what would have been im-
possible to do in the bonds of conventionalism
and traditionalism. He had freedom to follow
the best teachings of experience unhampered by
precedents. And he found great scholars and
teachers who were eager to join him on that
"battleground for new and living thoughts,"
the "meeting-place for the world's contending
forces." He had the love of struggle, but, bet-
ter than this, he had the genius for hard work.
Yet he had never the mien of one who was con-
sciously and anxiously bearing great burdens.
He kept ever a buoyant spirit and a cheerful
face.

Once he defined the university as the prophet
of democracy. And himself the incarnation of
the spirit and purpose of his own university, he
stood upon our western horizon a prophet — a
prophet, worthy to have place with those proph-
ets of the elder day whose scriptures he so dili-
gently searched. The great teacher is always
the great prophet in that he foreordains by his
teaching. The prophetic power of this man
was heightened, multiplied, by his assembling
about him hundreds of other prophets, organiz-
ing, inspiring, directing their efforts, that the
prophecy of his ideals should come true ; and es-
tablishing a school of prophets which for gene-
rations should continue, not merely to interpret
the past and measure the present, but, as Presi-
dent Harper himself wrote out of his aspiration
for it, "to lead democracy in the true path." In
the very midst of his definition of the univer-
sity as a prophet, he reveals the militant char-
acter of his own ideal prophet, — a university
that fights the battles of democracy, its war-cry

UNIVERSITY RECORD

being, "Come, let us reason together." This is
the best depiction of himself — not a mere inter-
preter of the past or a measurer of the present,
but a militant, dynamic prophet of the future as
well.

He has left us, among other writings, his lit-
tle volume of addresses and essays entitled "The
Trend of Higher Education." This is not a
good title. The book is not the survey of one
who is sitting calmly apart watching the tend-
ency of things ; it is the appeal of one who, see-
ing waste on the one hand and need on the
other, is creating tendencies against the waste
and toward the meeting of the need. It is again
the militant scholar crying, "Come, let us rea-
son together," but employing his great energies
of soul and body to avoid waste and meet the
need which his own eyes have seen.

The heroism of the last year of his life has
glorified his patient achievements. The she-
kinah has manifested itself in the great temple
he has builded. That presence has hallowed all
that his spirit has touched. This is the best
promise for the future of the university, that
the great machine conducted by him — complex
as it seems, almost beyond the efficient manage-
ment of any one else — is ever to have that at-
tendant spirit, even as the wheels which the
prophet Ezekiel saw in his vision had their cher-
ubim which went whenever and wherever the
wheels went.

The University of Chicago now has its past
in the completed chapter of his life, and comes
among the great universities of the world with
a chronicle of which any university might well
be proud.

UNIVERSITY RECORD

PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF DR. HARPER

BY FRANK KNIGHT SANDERS, D.D.
Formerly Dean of the Yale Divinity School

It is natural that those who knew President
Harper only as the organizer of a great insti-
tution of learning, or as the man of ready and
pronounced interest in civic or social affairs,
never unwilling to use his energies unselfishly,
or as the keen and far-sighted maker of experi-
ments in the educational world, should lay
stress upon his marvelous qualities as an or-
ganizer, upon his tirelessness, his unfailing op-
timism, his unquenchable belief in ideals and
skill in putting them into realizable form.

It is also natural that those who met him
only in the classroom, or at public gatherings,
should have carried away an ineffaceable im-
pression of the seeker after truth, a man of
scholarly enthusiasms, an untiring student,
never fearing hard work for himself, and an
inspiring leader, who exacted it from every
student, possessing, however, an unusual ability
in sharing with others those things on which
he laid the highest value. Perhaps this last
mentioned characteristic affords the key to Dr.
Harper's lovable personality, one which, under
conditions promotive in the highest degree of
jealousies, misunderstandings, and even bitter
opposition, kept creating and grrppling friends,
who remained continuously loyal to him.

While habitually generous and thoughtful
for everyone, Dr. Harper did not reveal his in-
nermost self to many. He had to fight too
many battles for that. But he was a singularly
helpful and inspiring friend to those who were
allowed to share his intimacy. Such realized
the finer and deeper sides of his nature, and
that with uncommon quickness.

It was my good fortune to be brought into

' Reprinted from the Congregationalist of January
20, 1906.

close personal contact with Dr. Harper at the
outset of his career at Yale. I well remember
the lasting impression made upon me in our
informal interview. I had come to the uni-
versity, believing that it was my duty to pursue
a certain course of study which was not exactly
in accordance with my real desires. I had
settled the question and made up my mind, but
there was still a lurking desire that my ambi-
tion to earn a doctor's degree might be grati-
fied. At a reception given to new students at
the university, which I attended and at which
he was present, I was pleased by his instant
recognition of me, as one of the forty or fifty
students whom he had seen only a few times,
and, almost without knowing how it happened,
found that I had been led by his attitude of
hearty sympathy to pour out my soul to him.
At once he grasped the situation, expressed the
deepest sympathy with it, invited me to come
and talk it over with him the following day,
and did not let the matter rest until arrange-
ments had been made, partly because of the
fuller light which he was able to throw upon
the situation, and partly by the use of his in-
fluence, which were entirely satisfactory to me.
Few men would have been as ready to throw
themselves whole-heartedly into the dreams of
an aspiring but undeveloped youth as he was
at that time.

It was the same spirit of generous friendli-
ness that led him repeatedly during his days
as a professor and president, even when work-
ing under the greatest pressure, to receive an
interrupting inquirer in a way that made the
latter feel that he was the most welcome guest
imaginable. For years after his departure from
Yale it was a common remark that no one was
ever able to detect a trace of resentment or an-

UJSriVEBSITY RECORD

vioyance in Dr. Harper's greeting, no matter
what the circumstances of meeting him might
be.

Another experience of my own character-
istically illustrates the wisdom with which he
dealt with his pupils. I remember being in a
class of graduate students who were dealing
with some of the general problems of the Old
Testament. His object in that class was not
so much to add to the information of the class
as to better its methods of investigation. One
day he assigned me as a task, to be reported
whenever I was ready, a paper on the First
Book of Samuel. His directions were simple
and comprehensive: thoroughly to master the
book and to bring before the class in due time
my judgment of it based upon independent
study. I received the assignment with some
indignation, regarding it as trivial. As a mat-
ter of fact, I found it a task peculiarly valuable
to me. So far as I am able distinctly to de-
termine, my own fascinated interest in biblical
study began with that bit of original work.
Instead of reporting to the class as I had
planned to do within a week or two, I allowed
two months to pass, each week filled with the
hardest kind of study, before I ventured to
present my results, apologizing at that time
because my investigations had not been really
complete. It was just such a bit of work as
I needed at that particular stage in my own
career as a student. I have often felt grateful
to my honored teacher for his kindly firmness
in insisting on that assignment.

Another characteristic experience will illus-
trate the generosity with which he dealt with
those he trusted. After receiving my graduate
degree at Yale, I continued there as one of
Dr. Harper's assistants. My energies at the
first were only in part devoted to strictly
academical work. A large proportion of time
was given to the development of the Institute
of Sacred Literature, a school for correspond-

ence instruction in Hebrew and other Semitic
languages and in the English Bible, which had
grown out of the older American Institute of
Hebrew. It was my duty, not merely to assist
in the work of correspondence instruction, but
to carry the principal responsibility of detailed
management. This was an important respon-
sibility for me at that time, and involved many
perplexing problems. It was characteristic of
Dr. Harper, however, to allow me to shoulder
the responsibility and to reap whatever honor
there might be in carrying our plans to a suc-
cessful issue, merely contenting himself with
saying: "If you get into trouble, let me know."
It was this habit of his to sketch out an enter-
prise, but to leave considerable freedom in its
development to his subordinates, that made
them so appreciative of his friendship and so
continuously loyal to his leadership.

So masterful a man as he, with such broad
vision and such unlimited capacity of achieve-
ment, was tempted to use his ability relentless-
ly, to drive straight over opposition. It was
always true that he neither spared himself nor
others ; but his unselfishness was so genuine,
his friendliness so real, his willingness to share
with others so marked, that no one who worked
with him ever resented being driven ; he rather
felt that he was one of a team and that it was
his privilege to do his utmost.

Many tributes will be paid to Dr. Harper's
courage and faith, to his energy and zeal, to
his enterprise and wisdom. We who have been
his close companions rejoice to bear affection-
ate testimony to his real goodness, to his friend-
liness, to his delight at the achievement of
others, and his quick sympathy with all that
was worth doing anywhere. To serve under
him was an education. To know him well was
a constant inspiration for life's service. To be
his familiar friend was a revelation of some of
the elements which enter into the finest type
of Christian manhood.

UNIVERSITY RECORD

THE LATE PRESIDENT HARPER'

BY GEORGE ADAM SMITH, D.D., LLD.

Professor of Hebreiv in the United Free Ciiurch College, Glasgow, Scotland

The death of William Rainey Harper, Pres-
ident of the University of Chicago, is a severe
loss to the forces of education in the United
States, to the ranks of Old Testament scholar-
ship throughout the world, and to a very large
number of workers in these and other depart-
ments, who enjoyed the privilege of his gen-
erous friendship and of his most inspiring ex-
ample. . . .

I do not know what his earliest appoint-
ments were, but soon after he was thirty he
became professor of the Old Testament at Yale.
He was a born teacher, and to his masterly
grasp of the Hebrew language and a gift of
lucid exposition, added a strong passion for his
subject, which he had a wonderful power of
communicating to his students. His very great
ability for organization could not be satisfied
with the work of his university classes ; and,
besides engaging in the administration of the
summer school at Chautauqua, and teaching
and lecturing there, he started and for years
conducted a system of teaching Hebrew by
correspondence, which was taken advantage of
by large numbers of students, lay and clerical,
throughout the States. It was these proofs
of his organizing faculty which led to his elec-
tion, when only thirty-five, as president of the
still future University of Chicago.

American universities excel our own in the
wisdom of choosing as their official and busi-
ness heads men of comparative youth, in their
full energy and with their career still to make.
His work as president during the last fifteen
or sixteen years has more than justified the
choice of him. He had a unique opportunity,

^ Reprinted in part from
Weekly of January i8, 1906.

the London British

it is true, in the powers conferred on him, and
the finances at his disposal. But it was due to
his zeal and thoroughness in the initial stages
of his presidency, and to the infection of the
energy and high ideals which he sustained to
the end, that these financial resources, large to
begin with, were more than quadrupled.

He had a most vigilant instinct for educa-
tional worth in other men, of all departments
of learning, and seldom made a mistake in his
choice of lieutenants. His eye was upon every
branch of science, and he kept him.self abreast
of its most recent achievements and require-
ments. Also, I never met so vigorous and self-
reliant a personality, which was so ready to
learn and unlearn. He had a singularly open
and alert mind. Whether it was the arrange-
ment of the studies, of which he was a recog-
nized master, and their allied departments ; or
the founding of a new faculty like sociology ;
or the building of scientific laboratories ; or the
amalgamation and reorganizing of a medical
school in connection with the University; or
the founding of a hospital ; or the direction of
secondary education intended to lead up to the
University, he made himself master of all the
details, and has left his stamp on every one of
these, and on all the other separate depart-
ments of his sudden, immense, and carefully
organized University.

But his versatility and ability would never
have achieved such results without his extraor-
dinary personal strength and powers of work.
The late Dr. Bruce, himself an unwearied
worker, who lived and worked with Dr. Har-
per for weeks at a time, told me that I should
find him the hardest worker I had ever met.
That was also Henry Drummond's testimony;
and when I came to live and work in the Pres-

UNIVERSITY RECORD

ident's house at Chicago, I found it true. All
the time that Dr. Harper was occupied in form-
ing and administering the University, he taught
his own subject two hours daily, he lectured
much away from home, and during the Chau-
tauqua term, July and August, he spent from
Saturday afternoon to Monday morning at that
summer school, though it lies over eighteen
hours by rail from Chicago. In addition to all
this, he preserved his mastery over the rapidly
widening science of the Old Testament, and
was able, just before he went into the surgeon's
hands, to publish one of the most learned and
judicious commentaries on the Old Testament
which have appeared during the last fifty years.
But his greatest and most enduring monu-
ment will be the University itself, the work of
only fifteen years ; a vast and noble pile of
buildings, a staff of more than two hundred
professors and lecturers, and a body of many
hundreds of students. Besides the teaching

and examining work common in universities,
which has been sustained from one year's end
to the other — the summer or vacation schools
filling up the holidays usual in other universi-
ties — Chicago has issued, in some cases under
the editorship of Dr. Harper, a large number
of periodicals on various sciences, which are
the recognized American authorities on their
subjects. One can hardly conceive of a larger
range of labor efficiently commanded and in
parts personally served by one man in our day.
Throughout this varied career of attention
to so many departments of academic life, Dr.
Harper has preserved his religious temper, and
worked loyally for the ethical and religious
character of his university. And his courage
and faith in face of the early death that has
confronted him for these two years has been
even more of an inspiration to his friends than
the unwearied devotion of his strength to the
great work of his life.

UNIVERSITY RECORD

WILLIAM RAINEY HARPER

BY LYMAN ABBOTT, D.D.

Editor of The Outlook

It is given to few men to achieve so much
in so brief a space as William Rainey Harper
achieved in a lifetime of less than half a cen-
tury. Born in 1856, graduated at fourteen,
receiving a doctor's degree from Yale Univer-
sity at nineteen, professor of Hebrew at
twenty-three, president of the University of
Chicago at thirty-five, he died at the age of
forty-nine, having in his fourteen years of ad-
ministration put that university in the front
ranks of the universities. A scholar whose
learning in his special department gave him the
respect of scholars, a teacher whose capacity to
arouse enthusiasm was such that he was said to
have made Hebrew at Yale as popular as foot-
ball, an extraordinary reader of men, so that in
an unprecedentedly brief time he gathered
about him a brilliant and powerful faculty, an
executive to whose sagacious energy the Uni-
versity of Chicago is a splendid monument, an
administrator from whose instinctive observa-
tion and unfailing memory no detail escaped
perception and recording, we believe that his
greatest and most permanent influence is due to
an idealism with which he was credited only by
those who had watched his work most closely
and studied him most intimately. It was this
idealism that enabled him to create a new type
of university.

The distinctive characteristic of the English
university is culture. Itself the product of a
splendid aristocracy, it in turn produces the
world's finest aristocrats. Its product is the
English gentleman. The distinctive character-
istic of the German university is scholarship.
Growing up in an atmosphere of erudition, it in
turn produces the erudite student. Its product

^ This editorial is reprinted, by permission, from
the Outlook of January 20, 1906.

is the German scholar. These two types of
university, coming across the ocean, have here
been naturalized. The older college, formed on
the model of the English university, and pri-
marily classical and literary, produced the
gentleman — an American gentleman. Its aim
was culture. The newer college, formed on
the model of the German university, and
primarily technical even in its classical and
literary work, produces the scholar — an Ameri-
can scholar. Its aim has been scholarship.
The difference between the old and the new
has been a diflference not merely in curriculum
and method, but in unconscious aim and spirit.
President Harper in the University of Chicago
has given the world a new type, because a type
animated by a different spirit and proposing to
itself a different aim. If we may define the
spirit of the English university by the word
culture and that of the German university by "
the word scholarship, we may define that of the
new type that President Harper has given to
the world by the word service.

If all readers were careful, which they are
not, it would hardly be necessary to say that the
difference which we here note is relative, not
absolute, a difference not of essence but of
emphasis. The older college of the English
type produces scholars. The newer college of
the German type produces gentlemen ; and
doubtless the University of Chicago has pro-
duced both scholars and gentlemen. But the
unconscious emphasis of the first has been on
quiet culture, of the second on zestful investiga-
tion, of the third on preparation for an active
American life. The scholarship which the first
has regarded as a means and measure of self-
development, and the second as an end in itself,
the third has regarded as an equipment for
service.

UNIVERSITY RECORD

This spirit of service is here too sharply
differentiated from that of other and older
institutions of learning, for accuracy of defini-
tion is never possible in the spiritual realm;
but it is the emphasis which the University of
Chicago has put upon this spirit in its organi-
zation and administration that has given to that
university its peculiar history and its distinctive
features. An institution to equip men for
service belonged not in an academic town ;
rather in a great commercial metropolis, and
in such a metropolis in the middle West. The
location was fitly chosen. Equipment for
service appealed to men to whom mere culture
aaid mere scholarship made no appeal, and so
brought to Mr. Harper the financial partners
whose generous co-operation has given the
University its endowment ; and never, we sup-
pose, in academic history has so large an en-
dowment been given in so brief a time. Equip-
ment for service led to the organization of a
course of study continuous throughout the
year, with liberty to pupils to come and go,
taking their instruction in fragments as best
they could. Equipment for service inspired it
to develop a university extension scheme and
to form affiliations with sister and smaller insti-
tutions, so extending its organic influence into
other communities and through other states.
This spirit of equipment for service has in-
spired it with a more than intellectual devotion,
has imparted to it an atmosphere of absolute
intellectual freedom, has bestowed upon it high
ethical standards, pre-eminently so on all so-
ciological topics, and has preserved it from the
perils which otherwise might endanger an in-
stitution organized in a commercial city and
directed to practical ends in a commercial com-
munity. And last, but not least, this spirit of
equipment for service has been caught by other
and older institutions, from which the new in-
stitution has inherited traditions of culture and

of scholarship, and to which it has given in ex-
change a spirit of direct and immediate service-
ableness.

Dr. Harper was a greater man than his gene-
ration realized. Doubtless he had the defects
of his qualities; but the qualities will be re-
membered long after the defects are forgotten.
To the future he will appear great, not merely
for his scholarship, his teaching enthusiasm, his
mastery of detail, his indomitable energy; he
will be recognized as one who felt America's
need of a new type of university, not to sup-
plant but to supplement other types, and as one
who, with the vision to see, had also the power
to realize. The future, which he has himself
helped to educate, will see that he was the
founder, not of a commercial college nor of a
technical school, but of an American university.
It will see that he was an educational seer and
an educational pioneer. And some appreciat-
ing friend will build for him the one monument
he would desire above all others, by putting in
the center of the University campus the college
cathedral which it was his ambition to erect
there, to symbolize and to nourish that spiritual
life which he sought to make the inspiration
and the glory of the University, as equipment
for service was its dominating purpose.

Such a soul cannot die ; death has no domin-
ion over it. Alfred Tennyson has written its
biography :

Life piled on life
Were all too little.

Jonathan Edwards has interpreted its spirit.'
"To live with all my might while I do live."
When death sent a message before to say, "I
am coming," he altered not one whit his life.
He neither defied death as an enemy that he
hated, nor welcomed it joyously as a friend that
summoned him to rest from his labors. He
counted death as an insignificant incident, and
with unabated devotion to his fellows and his

UNIVERSITY RECORD

God he continued his service to the end. Then,
when death opened the door, he walked calmly
through, from life to life.

The influence of his last days gave a sacred
radiance to the funeral services on Sunday af-
ternoon at the University. They were not a
requiem for the dead, but a commemoration of
the living. The fitly chosen words of interpre-

tation and of appreciation spoken by three of his
intimate friends were characterized by a simpli-
city, sincerity, and vision which made those pres-
ent realize the spirit of the risen leader and for-
get his broken and tenantless house, and in-
spired them with hopeful aspiration and strong
resolve to live their lives in service as unselfish
and in faith as strong as his.

UNIVERSITY RECORD

IHE DEATH OF WILLIAM R. HARPER'

The long fight which President WilHam R.
Harper, of the University of Chicago, has made
against the inroads of a mortal disease reached
the inevitable result Wednesday. The insti-
tution over which he had presided since July,
1891, and which he had developed upon such
broad and eificient lines, will be his monument.
He would have been fifty years old next July,
so that within this short life have been crowd-
ed his large achievements in the educational
world. He was one of the most modern school
of university executives, and his capacity for
work was marvelous. That his life has been
shortened by it will not be questioned, but he
has paid the price, and gladly, of his large ac-
complishments. When Professor Harper was
brought from the Yale divinity school, where
he had occupied the chair of the Semitic lan-
guages, and was also during his later years
there Woolsey professor of biblical literature,
a man had been secured who was to represent
the most hustling spirit of his environment.
Chicago does things in pork and wheat, and
what not, and President Harper did things in
the collegiate world that were equally master-
ful and amazing. That wonderful university
sprang from his brain and hands into a develop-
ment that commanded recognition all over the
world, if not always, at once, scholarly approv-
al. It was astonishing that a theological pro-
fessor, however youthful, possessed, and de-
veloped so broadly, all the modern executive
resources. The system by which he advanced
and conducted the University embraced the
most close attention to details, while it com-
prehended a wide and free outlook in educa-
tional progress. The amount of work which
Dr. Harper performed, in addition to his thor-

' Reprinted in part from the Springfield Repub-
lican of January 12, 1906.

ough organization of the University, has been
rarely, if ever, equaled by any man in a similar

position

The work which Dr. Harper did for the
study of Hebrew is worthy of remark. He
brought life and interest into a study which
had been relegated to theological seminaries,
where students gave little time to it, and that
little grudgingly, from things which appeared
to them to be of more immediate interest and
value. Hebrew scholarship, outside of a few
seminary chairs, was unknown. His corre-
spondence school did much to change this situ-
ation, and there came the discoveries of the
treasures of the Assyrian valley to quicken and
widen the investigation by students not only
of the Bible, but of history, art, and civiliza-
tion. He established a summer school in Chi-
cago back in 1881, where the best teachers
of Assyrian, Arabic, and Syriac came into alli-
ance with the Hebrew instructors. Distin-
guished scholars were called to lecture on their
special themes in connection with these lan-
guages and the Old Testament. Thus the
professors of the Semitic languages in more
than fifty institutions were formed into the
American Institute of Hebrew. In this new
Semitic movement Dr Harper was the leader
and organizer. Dr. Harper's method of in-
struction and inspiration in these lines have
thus been set forth :

He calls his method inductive; but before all
characteristics of method is the fundamental as-
sumption that complete mastery of the language is
attainable with reasonable effort, and nothing less
is fit to be aimed at. This brushes away all the old
superficial, empirical ways of study, and brings one
to the thorough scientific pursuit of knowledge. His
inductive method is the method of nature, of facts
before principles, language before grammar. He is
more than a linguist — he is a philologist. In the anal-
ysis of forms he carries the mind back continually

UNIVERSITY RECORD

to the fundamental laws of the language and of all
language, and with constant practice in writing and
pronouncing, with incessant use of eye and ear, with
much sight reading and memorizing of words, but no
memorizing of grammar except incidentally in con-
nection with observed facts and principles, the pupil,
by a process of reasoning as well as of memory, comes
into a masterful possession of the speech. Indom-
itable physical vigor, a steady glow of enthusiasm,
intellectual insight, rapidity and energy, philosophical
grasp and rational unfolding of his subject, perfect
facility of distribution or power to lay hold of each
student and give him just what he needs, with a
beaming disposition to help everybody — these are
the remarkable qualities that make up his equipment.

Thus Dr. Harper had rich acquirement in his
special lines, and to that he added in a wonder-
ful degree the ready decision, practical com-
mon-sense, and persistent activity of the most
progressive of modern men of affairs. This
was the secret of his remarkable success as an
educator, which was most strikingly shown in
his work at Chautauqua. He was a scholar,
but not a recluse, and possessed the rare gift
of imparting human interest to the driest
studies. When Mr. Rockefeller got hold of

Dr. Harper he chose wisely, and when the new
president went to the Middle West he was go-
ing home. He was of the new American type,
strong in body, sense, and zeal, and carried to
his great task of building up the University,
not only culture, but a thorough knowledge of
his environment, and an understanding of the
people with whom he had to deal, from the
millionaire benefactor of the institution to the
students who made up the University. The
old college president, with his leisurely grace,
philosophic thought, and restful charm, was
not repeated in this new man. He did not
fall short on the spiritual side, but was mas-
tered by the idea of service to his generation
and the purpose to get straight at it. He sought
to have the University represent character
more than the old emotional form of goodness.
He inspired research and scholarship, as well
as work for the slums, and as the University
grew in stone and mortar, it also grew in the
purpose of service. He was a worker of the
most intense type, and has left his large im-
press upon the most pushing and forceful uni-
versity in America. . . .

UNIVERSITY RECORD

WILLIAM RAINEY HARPER, THE MAN'

BY ALBION WOODBURY SMALL

Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Literature

It can seldom be said of anyone with more
truth than of President Harper that he seemed
to concentrate his whole self upon the pro-
gramme of a given moment. Naturally, there-
fore, many persons who have been in direct
touch with him at some point assume that they
have the only true view of the real man. A
large number of persons have been in close con-
tact with one or more phases of his life. In
many cases those who have been associated
with him longest and most frequently may have
less precise insight into one of these special as-
pects of his character than others who have re-
ceived exceptionally vivid impressions of that
particular side of the man.

A stranger who had seen him order a dinner
under the most favorable circumstances might
forever after cherish the illusion that the key to
his whole character is to be found in the tastes
of an epicure. Another stranger who had seen
him leave the table for a night or a day or sev-
eral days of forced work with scarcely a
thought of food or sleep, might say that the
man was at heart an ascetic, and that the pleas-
ures of the table were to him merely items in a
programme of winning his way by a show of
good fellowship. If one were to judge solely
by the amount of thought and labor he would
expend upon the forms and ceremonies of an
academic or social function, it would be easy to
class him as a martinet with vision only for
trifles. One might have known him simply
while he was studying large questions of gen-
eral policy, and might have gained the idea that
he cared "nothing whatever for details, but was
interested merely in probing down to essential
principles.

' Reprinted, by permission,
January 20, 1906.

from the Standard of

Some men have doubtless been intimately as-
sociated with him in certain ways without de-
tecting any signs that he was religious. These
may imagine that they have found him out as
at bottom a hard-headed man of affairs, cyni-
cally indulgent of the superstitions of others,
prudently silent about his contempt for their
opinions, but really a pagan and a materialist.
Their perceptions would be quite as near the
truth as those of a man who is color-blind and
can see only one shade of light in the rainbow.
Other men would discover in President Harper
a simple and sturdy Christian faith daily over-
coming the world.

Antitheses of this sort might be multiplied at
great length by comparing different divisions of
President Harper's life. There would be a basis
of truth behind each of these partial views.
Facts that lend themselves to the most contra-
dictory estimates are actually in evidence. A
perfectly just combination of them could be
made only by a man as many-sided as he was,
who had also known him with equal intimacy in
every phase of his character. No one is likely
to profess these qualifications. Any single
picture of the man will be credible in the degree
in which it leaves room for lines to be drawn
from many other points of view.

No portrait of President Harper can be quite
natural unless it reveals him as an unspoiled boy
frankly interested to the very last in every as-
pect of life. There was no more virility and no
less morbidness in his eager attention to reports
from the last Thanksgiving day football game
than in his earnest reflection the same day about
the future life. Each was a candid trait of his
nature. Life to him was not one type of activity
to the exclusion of others. It was all the activ-
ities that give genuine expression to any frac-

UNIVERSITY RECORD

tion of human endowment. The only factor in
the economy of Hfe which he obstinately under-
valued was rest. One of the most pathetic re-
grets that he expressed during the last weeks of
his life was that he had wasted so much time!

Aside from the scant ration of sleep that he
allowed himself, his recuperation was usually
change of effort. Even when he was most com-
pletely off duty and out of the harness, he was
always making preliminary motions for the next
undertaking. In his most playful moods one felt
that under the surface he was busy running
down clues to new ideas. Tireless action, both
physical and mental, was his normal state. His
curiosity never ceased to be almost childishly
naive and persistent. He had an omniverous
appetite for new experiences, and so long as
they afforded fresh points of contact with hu-
man interests he made no arbitrary distinctions
between them. In a southern city he would
take as much trouble to hunt out the quaintest
survivals of negro religious traits as he would
in St. Petersburg to get an audience with the
czar, or in his own study to test a theor}' of
textual interpretation.

He was an unspoiled boy in the perpetual
youth of his enthusiasms. The memorandum
book that was his constant vade rnecnm was
headed "Things to do." Those things crowded
upon each other like arriving and departing
trains at a great terminal. If necessary for its
success he could always be as eager about each
item in its turn as though his all were staked
upon it.

One is tempted at every point to say: "This
trait was the key to President Harper's char-
acter." The wiser second thought is that his
character was the key to his characters. Few
personalities have been less the consequence of
a predominating trait. A little analysis of his
characteristics, whether the more or the less
obvious, discovers that each was both cause and
effect of all the rest. The words "poise" and

"balance" carry associations with colder, less
ardent natures. They suggest a fixed equili-
brium of motives. President Harper's person-
ality was rather a perpetual transformation of
energy.

A cartoon in which his friends would recog-
nize lifelike features might be drawn in terms
either of his enthusiasm, his imagination, his
hopefulness or his prudence, his patience or
his caution. The sketch would nevertheless be
a caricature, unless it suggested all his other
qualities, and conveyed the impression that each
was a function of every other. He was not only
hopeful because he was imaginative and enthus-
iastic, but he was cautious and prudent and
patient for the same reason. Instead of the
words poised and balanced, we approach the
reality only with such words as unified, cen-
tered, correlated.

While President Harper was not a man of
one commanding trait or of one dominant idea,
his sharply contrasted traits and his widely vari-
ant ideas found their principle of coherence in
an inclusive moral conception. Years ago one of
his friends accused him of indifference to the in-
terests of individuals if they stood in the way
of results. In the closing days of his life, when
he w'as frankly expressing his inmost thoughts
about the past, and of the great change just at
hand, he said three things which contain the
proper reply to that charge. He spoke with
earnest deliberation, and with apology for the
egotism of his confidence. It impressed those
who heard it as an utterly sincere report of the
most searching self-examination. The first re-
mark was: "All this time I have never really
doubted for a moment that Providence had se-
lected me to do a work that no one else could
have done under the circumstances." The sec-
ond was : "I have tried to think whether I have
ever really wronged anybody. I have done
things that hurt people, but it was either unin-
tentionally, or because I believed it was neces-

UNIVERSITY RECORD

sary to act as I did. I cannot remember that I
have ever willingly done harm to anybody."
When he was reminded that he had intention-
ally done good to many hundreds of persons, at
great expense to himself, he did not disclaim
it, but treated it as a matter of course, in conse-
quence of his central thought. In another con-
versation, a few days later, he said to two
friends, "I have always felt that both of you
were too much inclined to say severe things
about other men's weak side. I have tried my
best to make the most of the good side of every-
body."

President Harper's outlook upon life may be
pretty fairly indicated by use of these land-
marks. Life presented itself to him in terms of
work to be done. It was not his way to sum
this work up in abstract ideas. He thought of
it rather in definite details and in concrete
pictures. The words which seemed to serve him
best as signs of his largest purposes were
"democracy" and "education." By "democracy"
he meant all the progress through which human
possibilities will at last be realized. "Educa-
tion" represented to him the special division of
progress and means to progress through which
his personal efforts for democracy must be
made. What other men, and he himself some-
times, would mean by such phrases as "the
kingdom of God" or "the divine plan" took
more practical shape in his mind, for working
purposes, in these two words, "democracy" and
"education." All his physical and mental and
moral force converged upon work for these
ends. All that he thought and did was with
reference to them. The idea of a "far-off divine
event" inspired him only when it fell within the
perspective of these principal and secondary
conceptions. The scheme of work that took
shape in his mind in view of these two concep-
tions was his final test of value. Nothing was
trivial enough to be ignored, if it could be en-
listed for education and democracy. Nothing

was important enough to be tolerated, if it was
inconsistent with these ends.

President Harper's attitude toward men and
things was a consistent reflection of his belief
that they all had a place to fill and a part to per-
form in human progress. Perhaps his remark-
able catholicity is best understood in this con-
nection. He was not merely indulgent toward
other men's views, and generous toward their
part in life, but every man seemed to him to
have a unique sphere for special work. His
catholicity was not mere consent to refrain from
interfering with others. It was a habit of ideal-
izing other men's powers and opportunities, and
of wishing he could put himself in their place
and do their part for all it was worth. One of
his most characteristic exclamations was : "How
I wish I could drop everything and give myself
to that 1" The catalogue of things about which
different persons have heard him make essen-
tially this expression would include some of the
most hopeless and thankless kinds of tasks in
school and church and state. Every thing that
needed to be done stimulated his ambition to do
it. A cynic might call this envy of other work-
ers, and greed to do everything himself. It was
sane and contagious sympathy with every part,
lesser or greater, that belonged in the whole
harmony of life.

In the same light we may best appreciate his
loyalties to persons. Friendship to him was
primarily partnership in work. Every man ap-
pealed to him who was serving a puq^ose in life,
or who seemed to him to have dormant powers
available for better uses. He wanted no friend-
ships with people who were good for nothing,
but every one who was trying to be good for
something could count on him as a friend.
"There are great possibilities of good in that
man" was a remark which he made oftener per-
haps than any other. It would be a serious
error to suppose that possible usefulness for his
own purposes was the condition of his friend-

UNIVERSITY RECORD

ships. He was drawn to every person who had
a will to bring good things to pass. With all
such he felt himself embarked in a common
cause. If the word "brother" had not dropped
out of our idiom, as a form of greeting between
kindred spirits, few men would have had more
frequent use for it, or in a more hearty sense.
Whenever he had once recognized another as a
man of good purpose he would have regarded it
as treason to a common cause to abate his sym-
pathy with him, or to begrudge any assistance
within his power.

It would be another false interpretation to
construe his loyalties as wholly impersonal.
While his central conception of life threw his
friendships into sharp relief as responsibilities
to be used, rather than as luxuries to be enjoyed,
it would astonish those who saw only his
strength and self-reliance in action to know how
he cherished friendships for their own sake,
how responsive he was to them, how dependent
he was upon them. William Rainey Harper, the
man, had a gamut of personal intimacies as wide
as the range of action of President Harper, the
worker. His devotion to his tasks, not his in-
clination, restricted his purely personal inter-
course.

To trace his influence over other men to his
central conception of life may seem to contra-
dict the judgment that no single element of his
character accounts for the whole. In fact no
plausible explanation of President Harper's abil-
ity to lead others can be proposed without re-
affirming that judgment. Not merely scholars,
but business men of many types, interrupted the
habits of a lifetime to see with his eyes, and
judge by his standards, and act in the line of
his plans. Among scholars and educators, how-
ever individual his views, they always com-
manded attention and exerted influence. Mem-
bers of his own faculty often reached conclusions
directly opposed to his. They may never have
withdrawn or modified the conclusions. Prob-

ably they would acknowledge without exception
that their own estimate of the relative import-
ance of their conclusions always suffered a cer-
tain shrinkage when they found that President
Harper could not be convinced.

No university president has ever assumed a
more formidable task of unifying unlike indi-
viduals in one faculty. Yet no president has
ever been more successful in retaining con-
fidence as a leader, in spite of the most vigorous
dissent from specific details of policy and sharp
conflicts of academic interests. There is no
credible explanation of all this in his courage,
or his enterprise, or his ideality, or in any other
single trait. Whether the men whom he has
influenced have been distinctly conscious of his
own focus of action or not, he could not have
affected them as he did if he had not been a man
of finely modulated motives, of strictly organ-
ized energies, and of accurately adjusted aims.
Method alone could not have achieved this re-
sult. His method was merely the active form
of his fundamental view of life.

In all this we have observed President Har-
per's real religion. It was dedication, not
dogma. He took for granted the simple Chris-
tian elements that he had learned in childhood,
but for him their sum and substance was the
duty and the joy of work. To him religion
meant the best work in his power for all the
good causes he could promote. The impulse of
religion rather than a theory of it, was the con-
stant undercurrent of his life. The year of
physical decline was a period of eminent spirit-
ual growth. It began during his visit to Lake-
wood, N. J., in the spring of 1905, and was in
progress as long as his mind was clear.
It was growth through intense mental struggle.
He called in friends who had worked with him
for years, and had never entertained a doubt of
the essentials of his faith, to help him find his
own solution for the ultimate religious prob-
lems. He said he had not been prepared to be-

UNIVERSITY RECORD

lieve that his personality could be so revolu-
tionized. The occupations of his past life had
come to seem relatively trivial, and he wanted
to adjust himself to the larger interests that
were now foremost. In the talks that followed
he studied the new situation as methodically
and frankly as though it had been the routine
business of a university committee. He re-
turned time and again to this point of departure :
"I am not a philosopher, and never could be.
Leave out all the philosophy and all the the-
ology, and help me get a plain man's view of
what I really think about God, and the future
life, and my own personal relations to Jesus
Christ."

After the struggle was over, and the talks had
become surveys of results, or meditations upon
what they meant for himself and others, he was
asked : "How do you account for your complete
calmness and freedom from problems before the
operation a year ago, v/hen you understood that
the chances of recovery were only one in twenty,
and the conflict that you have gone through
since?" He answered instantly, "Why, I never
had time to think these things through before.
I could only do my work. In the last year there
has been plenty of time to think."

But this change was after all a spiritual re-
valuation and affirmation of what he had been
doing all his life. It brought out more pro-
nounced desire for fellowship with Christ than
he had been conscious of before, and it prompted
him to express severer judgments upon his
faults than his friends would accept. In effect,
however, it was merely the mental and moral
maturing of the faith that had controlled
through life. Its main points were simple and
unequivocal : God, the spirit of life, manifested
in the whole visible universe; the individual

soul; Jesus, "the way, the truth, and the life,"
the most intimate revelation of the nature of
God and the destiny of the soul ; the parable of
the Prodigal Son, as the deepest disclosure of
the relation of God to his children. He was
perfectly clear in his conclusion that the ulti-
mate test of his relations with God is not a
balancing of the good against the evil that he
had done, nor reliance upon any scheme of pro-
pitiation, but simply the question of fact,
whether, as the total outcome of his experience,
his heart was set on knowing as much of the
divine purpose as he could learn, and on de-
voting himself to it with all his powers. With
perfectly calm contemplation of death as imme-
diately at hand, he said, "I have no idea what
the activities of the next stage of existence will
be like, but I have less hesitation about taking
the next step into the future than I had about
leaving Yale and coming to Chicago."

One of President Harper's lieutenants has
been associated with him a great many times
when he had escaped from the routine and the
restraint of his professional duties. He has
been with him in distant cities, both in this
country and in Europe. He has seen him mak-
ing a business of relaxation as intensely as he
made a business of work, and under conditions
which granted him the largest freedom from
observation. He has seen him do a great many
things that, considered by themselves, would
fairly be classed as frivolous. He has never, in
a single instance, known President Harper to
do an act, or to utter a word, which, either at
the moment or in the retrospect, could justly be
pronounced a compromise of his dignity. He
invariably held himself subject to instant self-
control when the moment arrived for a serious
attitude. In work and in play he was a sincere
and consistent Christian gentleman.

UNIVERSITY RECORD

WILLIAM RAINEY HARPER: AN APPRECIATION'
BY SHAILER MATHEWS
Professor of Systematic Theology

Unless a teacher, like the late Master of
Baliol, possesses some idiosyncrasy or ability
to make bomiiots, his life does not possess the
sort of material with which biographies gener-
ally abound. He may accomplish great things,
but his life lacks dramatic elements.

William Rainey Harper furnishes no excep-
tion to this generalization. Few stories con-
cerning him float about the campus of any in-
stitution where he has taught. He had no per-
sonal peculiarities to start the legend-making
process, and in all his published works there
is hardly a sentence which can be detached
from its context for the purpose of quotation.
On the rare occasions in which he talked freely
concerning his early life, his recollections dealt
almost exclusively with struggles to found an
institution or journal, and beyond an occasional
and characteristically modest reference to his
own share in the work, were impersonal. In
his reminiscences, as in his daily life, he was
absorbed in causes, not in himself.

This self-sacrificing, corporate ambition,
anyone who knew him at all well recognized as
his great and dominant trait. To personal ad-
vantages he was indifferent. He might have
died a comparatively rich man, if he had saved
the money he gave to causes to which he had
devoted himself. He had enough success in
his life to furnish self-conceit for a dozen or-
dinary men, but to the very end he was as
simple as a clean-hearted boy. Even those who
criticised his methods and policies never sus-
pected him of self-seeking.

It is a long way between a boy of nineteen,
principal of a Masonic college somewhere in
Kentucky, and the creator of a great univer-

^ Reprinted from
January 20, 1906.

the Sunday School Times of

sity. The thirty years which made Dr. Har-
per's public life were full of growth and
achievements, and make a much longer career
look insignificant. No man ever depended less
upon "influence." Utterly unknown when he
began life, he had to conquer friendships as
he conquered circumstances.

President Harper had essentially a creative
mind. As an administrator pure and simple
he was equaled by many men, but as a man
of creative imagination balanced with executive
ability, in my opinion he is unequaled among
the great educators of today. As time passes
his significance will be seen to lie in that which
was original with himself. Other men have
achieved great success in developing existing
institutions, or in following inherited lines of
action. Dr. Harper was a pioneer who made
a splendid thoroughfare of a trail he had him-
self blazed. He originated study by corres-
pondence. He founded three theological jour-
nals. He made popular Bible study a national
movement. He made university extension an
integral part of collegiate education. He sys-
tematized the inductive method in the study of
languages. He was the founder of the Religi-
ous Education Association. If he did not in-
vent, he built into genuine educational signifi-
cance, the summer sessions of our great uni-
versities. On broad lines, whatever is essen-
tially characteristic of the University of Chi-
cago is due to him. The least acquaintance
with the educational world will show what tliis
cold statement of facts means. Any one of
these achievements would have given national
significance to another man.

The world at large thinks of him most of all
as the President of the University of Chicago.
Although we are too close to him as yet to get

UNIVERSITY RECORD

his true perspective, it is probable that as Presi-
dent he will be longest known. But he was
also one of the foremost Semitic scholars in
the world. There is no president of any uni-
versity of any considerable size who is in his
class as an original investigator. With the ex-
ception of one or two collections of essays, his
writings are essentially those of a specialist.
Treatises on Hebrew grammar and syntax
made his early reputation, but he lived long
enough to complete the finest piece of work on
Amos and Hosea ever produced in English, if
not in any language. Teaching and scholarly
pursuits served him as a tonic and an inspira-
tion. He was holding two professorships at
Yale when he was called to Chicago. He
taught as much, if not more, than any other
man on his faculty. For years, in addition to
two or three regular courses during the week,
he taught a Sunday morning class composed
largely of undergraduates. I never saw him
so enthusiastic as after one of these Sunday
morning sessions, for above all else he loved
to teach the Bible to college students. He did
not believe it was the business of the teacher
to impose his opinions upon his students, and
chose to set before them the various possible
positions. But one could not avoid the in-
spiration of the born teacher.

As a teacher of the Bible, he could appeal
not only to special students, but to the rank
and file. There are few professors of biblical
subjects under fifty in the United States who
have not been members of his classes. They do
not all agree with his positions, but they all
recognize their debt to him as a teacher and
friend. His power over an audience when
talking upon biblical subjects was something
hard to analyze. He never was a popular
speaker, as such speakers go, and yet in Chau-
tauquas, in lecture courses, in addresses, in
clubs, in churches, and in religious gatherings,
his exposition of the Bible was something that

could never be forgotten. More than any other
man I ever knew, his method of thought was
controlled by biblical concepts. Who other
than he would have thought of founding a
philosophy of education on the distinction be-
tween the priest, the prophet, and the sage?

I knew him best on his biblical side, but my
duties constantly brought me into contact with
him in the region of administration. As any-
one who had any dealings with him knows, he
had extraordinary powers of analysis and asso-
ciation. There never was a man more intent
to get hold of general principles and to
carry them out analytically. It was another
illustration of his many-sidedness. As a
scholar he was inductive; as an administrator
he was deductive. This power led him in the
early days of the University to undertake work
in regions which would be surprising to any-
one who knew him only as an authority in
Semitics. For years there was practically no
detail in the management of the University
that was not controlled or determined by him.
From the general plans of a building to the
style of type in a convocation program his will
was final. Yet he was never arrogant. In his
creative moods he was singularly susceptible
to suggestion. To work with him at such
times was almost intoxicating. One shared
in his exuberant vitality and enthusiasm. One
of the charms of an hour's conversation with
him was that, no matter how great the pressure
might be upon him from many duties, he never
seemed to be hurried, but was always ready to
run off with almost boyish eagerness into any
subject suggested by the main matter under
discussion. Such excursions seldom failed to
result in some suggestion for later considera-
tion, and to be jotted down in one of the small
red notebooks all of us came to know so well.
And what is more, one always knew that any
suggestion that was worth while would ulti-
mately bring results. Though it might lie in

UNIVERSITY RECORD

the President's mind for months, it would some
day reappear as a part of a far-reaching plan.
He had singular capacity to estimate the real
value of men and opinions, but he was always
anxious to have men disagree with him, at
least for investigative purposes. In fact, it
was rather a favorite way of his to ask those
whom he took into private conference to raise
some obection to his opinions, or to answer him
as he raised objections to something to which
he was favorable. A more appreciative man
never lived. If one were to look for the secret
of his extraordinary success in the University
of Chicago, one item would be found in Presi-
dent Harper's ability to induce men of wide
experience in various fields of activity to give
him advice and co-operation. In a truer sense
than any of us yet realize he was the unifying
influence in all University affairs. It is a rare
man who can at once initiate, co-operate, and
unify.

But he was something more than a mere
educational Napoleon, as somebody once called
him. He was a great and many-sided man.
During his year of suffering it was this we
thought of most. The tragedy and pathos of
his fate brough into relief the man rather than
the official. His vitality and power of work
had seemed almost supernatural. It was this,
perhaps, as much as anything, that made men
feel they had every right to attack him and his
methods. While he himself had never en-
gaged in controversy, he had seemed so abun-
dantly able to take care of himself that men
the country over had not hesitated to treat
him as a worthy foeman. But when the tragedy
of his life broke upon him, the acrimony of
criticism and one-sided controversy was swept
away in an inundation of love. Men who had
differed with him honestly and vigorously
prayed for him. When last February he went
to the hospital, the entire country was in spirit

at his bedside. As one of his colleagues said,
he was enswathed with affection.

And all this affection was justified. His
spontaneity of sympathy, his singular capacity
to do graceful and kindly acts, his power of
binding friends to himself, was extraordinary.
A strong man is apt to be ruthless, and Presi-
dent Harper had tremendous strength of will.
But he never meant to be unkind. His posi-
tion forced him to hold in his hand the fate
of hundreds of lives. Sometimes he acted to
all appearances autocratically, but at heart he
was a democrat of democrats. He could not
treat a human being impersonally. I have seen
him sick at heart after he had been forced to
make some decision which cut into another
man's hopes. His sympathies were limitless.
He stole moments from his crowded life to call
upon sick students and stricken families. Men
went to him in trouble as they would go to no
one else. To injure him was to insure gener-
ous treatment. He forgot enmities, and he
remembered friendships. Up to the very last
he wrote little notes of appreciation and sug-
gestions to all of us. Great as a scholar,
greater as a president, he was greatest as a
friend.

In fact, no man ever had a larger capacity
for making friends than President Harper.
There are men throughout the country who
have been members of his classes, and some
even who have met him seldom, who think
they were peculiarly his intimates. And these
men knew him in a great variety of rela-
tions. The members of the National Educa-
tion Association knew him in one capacity, the
faculty of the University in another, biblical
students in another, his classes in another, and
men of affairs in still another. It is doubtful
whether more than two or three men ever got
to know him in all his capacities. The eager-
ness with which he welcomed a new interest
made it difficult for its representative to realize

UNIVERSITY RECORD

that he was only one among many to feel his
cordial and unaffected sympathy. I have talked
with him on many subjects, but the more I
knew him the more I saw there was to know.

Back of all this variety of great powers
which made President Harper more than a
merely versatile man and more than a mere
genius, was a genuine and profound religious
faith. He never was a theologian, and his
faith was in many ways untouched by philoso-
phy. If I were to characterize it, I should say
it was essentially biblical. He was both con-
sciously and unconsciously controlled by the
Bible. In the storm and stress of his manifold
life, there was always a unifying faith in God.
He did not wear his religion on his sleeve, but
any man could touch it if he wished. No stu-
dent in religious difficulty was ever denied a
conference. How far his influence was exerted
over the young men and women with whom he
worked it would be hard to estimate, but down
among the very elemental motives of his
soul was the desire to bring the Bible to

everybody. There are some things too sacred
to put in writing, but there is many a man who
knows what it is to have found in his words
and influence a new grip upon faith in God.
As simple as a child in his public prayers, he
was as elemental as a child in his religious
life. Never dodging a difficulty or fearing to
face a mystery, he has left us the memory of a
faith in God and immortality which was as
distinct and as controlling in his life as was
any element of his educational policy.

In these moments, when the sense of loss is
still acute, one dares not trust one's self to
speak of him too intimately. The recollection
of a year of heroic suffering, in which duties
were never forgotten and the kindly offices of
affection and love never neglected, is too sacred
to bear disclosure. It is enough to remember
now his splendid life and its achievements, and,
above all, to believe as he himself believed, that
his magnetic, creative, masterful soul is now
taking up new duties in a better life.

UNIVERSITY RECORD

THE PERSONAL RELIGION OF WILLIAM RAINEY HARPER

BY ERNEST DE WITT BURTON

Head of the Department of New Testament Literature and Interpretation

William Rainey Harper was born in 1856 in
New Concord, Ohio. His parents, Samuel
Harper and Ellen Elizabeth Rainey Harper,
were active and devout members of the United
Presbyterian church in New Concord. His
father, a graduate of Muskingum College, lo-
cated in New Concord, kept a general store,
and was the treasurer of the college.

From early childhood William was interested
in books, and most of all in the Bible. This
latter fact was due in part to the influence of
his grandmother Rainey, who was a very de-
voted student of the Bible, and well known for
her knowledge of it among the members of her
community. Before he could read, the boy de-
lighted to have the Bible read to him, and took
a special interest in a children's Life of Jesus,
which he called his "good book." His mother
relates of him that his father's store being near
to the home, he often took his book to his
father to have him read to him from it in the
intervals between the serving of customers. By
such reading he learned it largely by heart. As
soon as he could read he began to commit large
parts of the Bible to memory.

He entered college when he was ten years
old, and graduated when he was fourteen, hav-
ing habitually taken through his course more
than the required amount of work. In the three
years subsequent to his graduation he remained
at home, acting at salesman in his father's store,
and studying languages under a private in-
structor. As a boy he was unwilling to join
the church of his parents, but wished to con-
nect himself with the Presbyterian church.
From this course he was dissuaded by the ad-
vice of his father, who in subsequent years re-

' Reprinted, with modifications,
of January 20, 1906.

from the Standard

gretted having influenced him in this direction.
These years immediately following his gradu-
ation from college were not years of distinct
religious growth. The energies of the youth
were insufficiently employed, and to some ex-
tent the result usual in such cases ensued in
this also.

At the age of seventeen he went to Yale
University, where he received the degree of
doctor of philosophy just before he was nine-
teen. After a year's teaching in a college in
Macon, Tenn., he came to Granville, Ohio, in
1876, having been appointed as an instnictor
in the preparatory department of Denison
University. Dr. E. B. Andrews was at that
time president ; Professor Chandler, now of
the University of Chicago, was a member of the
faculty ; Professor F. J. Miller, a sophomore ;
and Professor C. F. Castle, a student in the
academy. At this time Dr. Harper attended
the Presbyterian church and was regarded by
all as a man of Christian character and life.
But in 1877, after some private conversation
with Professor Chandler and President An-
drews, he surprised alike his colleagues and
students by arising in a college prayer meeting
and saying, "I am not a Christian, I am not
sure that I know exactly what it is to be a
Christian, but I want to be a Christian." There
was at the time no special religious interest
and the step was taken wholly at his own ini-
tiative. Professor Castle, who was at this time
?. student in Dr. Harper's class, was so influ-
enced by the action of his admired instructor
that he also determined to enter upon the
Christian life. Dr. Harper and Mr. Castle
were baptized on the same day, Mr. Castle fol-
lowing Dr. Harper.

In 1878 the professorship of Hebrew in the
Baptist Union Theological Seminary at Mor-

VNIVEB8ITY RECORD

gan Park became vacant, and Dr. Harper, being
strongly recommended by President Andrews
and Professor Chandler, and doubtless also by
others, was appointed, and entered upon his
duties in January, 1879. It was at about this
time that he formed that determination which in
very large measure shaped the course of all
his remaining years. He recognized it as his
mission to devote himself to the study of the
Bible and the promotion of such study. In
the latter days of his life he said to his inti-
mate friends: "In all these years I have never
doubted that God had given me a work to do
which would go undone if I failed to do it."
Coming to Morgan Park, he threw himself
with all his characteristic energy into teaching
in the Theological Seminary and into religious
work. He filled successively various offices
in the church, including those of deacon and
superintendent of the Sunday school. Of the
manifold labors of the years 1879-86 in which
he remained at Morgan Park, this is not the
place to speak, save to mention the heroism
and unselfishness with which he devoted him-
self to the work to which he felt himself called.
Singlehanded and without money, his reputa-
tion as yet unmade, he toiled night and day
at his tasks. It was in these years that he
founded the Institute of Hebrew, which after-
wards became the Institute of Sacred Litera-
ture, and began his correspondence school,
and established the Hebrew Student, and He-
hraica, the former becoming subsequently the
Biblical World and the latter the Journal of
Semitic Languages. In 1886 he was called to
Yale to the professorship of Semitic languages,
to which was added in 1889 the Woolsey pro-
fessorship of Biblical Literature. Throughout
these years he was engaged not only in the
work of his professorship, but at Chautauqua
in teaching and the building up of the Chautau-
qua system, in the editing of the Old Testa-
ment Student and Hebraica, in the writing of

articles and books, and in lecturing upon the
Bible in colleges and before large audiences in
Philadelphia, New York, New Haven, Boston,
and elsewhere.

In 1891 he was elected president of the new
University of Chicago. He hesitated to accept
the office, not seeing at once how he could do
so consistently with that former unrevoked
and irrevocable devotion of his life to Bible
study. Only when he became convinced that
as president of the new university he could do
more to promote the study of the Bible on the
part of the people than by remaining as profes-
sor at Yale, did he obtain his own consent to
the acceptance of the presidency. Let it not be
supposed that he ever for a moment intended
to make the presidency a mere instrument for
the advancement of Bible study; rather was it
his conviction that, while discharging the duties
of the presidency for which his past experience
had convinced him that he had competency, he
could from the vantage ground of the presi-
dency, do more for the promotion of Bible study
than in the less advantageous position of a col-
lege professorship. During the nearly fifteen
years in which he was president of the Univer-
sity he threw himself with all his unparalleled
force and enthusiasm into the tasks which the
presidency brought him and the opportunities
which it opened to him. But he constantly
kept before him that his life-work was to study
the Bible and to promote the study by others.
He often said that if it ever became necessary
to choose between the presidency and his work
as a Bible teacher, it would be the former that
he should have to give up. From the strenu-
ous duties of administration he turned for re-
lief and refreshment of spirit to his classroom
and his books. And in the days of his last
illness he declared that he would rather have
produced his volume on Amos and Hosea than
to have achieved all that he had accomplished
through his presidency.

UNIVERSITY RECORD

Last September he laid down for the most
part the active duties of the presidency. None
who were present at the University Convoca-
tion held September i, will ever forget the
impressive scene when, having resolutely per-
formed all the President's duties through Con-
vocation week, he came to the last exercises
of the Convocation itself, and with voice that
could not be controlled expressed with char-
acteristic generosity his thanks to the execu-
tive officers of the University, and the members
of the Faculty, for their loyal co-operation with
him through the weeks and the months of his
illness. There were some present to whom
the scene had added pathos because, before
entering upon this series of public presidential
acts which taxed to the utmost his failing
strength, he had expressed to them his determi-
nation to go through them all, knowing that it
was the last time.

This task done, and his strength rapidly fail-
ing, he laid aside as far as possible alike his
scholarly and his administrative tasks, and
turned all the energy of his trained mind, still
clear and unclouded, to the consideration of the
great problems of personal religion : sin and its
forgiveness, fellowship with God, the place of
Jesus Christ in religion, the hope of eternal life.
He called his friends about him, first that they
might help him in his thinking, for he always
loved companionship in thought and work, and
then that he might impart to them the results of
his own thought. He brought to bear upon all
these great problems the same earnestness,
openness of mind, persistence, and courage with
which he had attacked in his previous days the
problem of the teaching of Hebrew, the found-
ing of a journal, the building up of a university.
Some day the surpassingly interesting story of
these last days ought to be told. Now it must
suffice to state a few of the results of his think-
ing which he shared as freely with his friends
as he had freely invited their help.

His personal faith in Jesus became clearer and
stronger than ever before. This faith was not
something new. His interest in Jesus Christ
began before he could read. As a child the
story of Jesus was his "good book." This
faith was renewed and emphasized when in
early manhood he expressed the determination
to become a Christian, and subsequently con-
nected himself with the Christian church.
Though he rarely spoke of it in public, it was
known to the few who were nearest to him that
in all these subsequent years, including those
of his presidency at Chicago, Jesus held a cen-
tral place in his religious thinking and faith.
Only a few months ago in speaking to one of
his colleagues he strongly deprecated, in lan-
guage almost impassioned, the adoption of any
course which should tend to weaken the faith
of the people in Jesus. But now this faith of
his youth and his manhood blossomed forth
into new strength. In one of these late conver-
sations, when his friend had been speaking of
fellowship with God, or perhaps of the forgive-
ness of sins, he said : "But now, what of Jesus
Christ?" And in another conversation, arraign-
ing himself sternly at the bar of conscience, re-
proving himself for the shortcomings of his life
with a severity to which his friends could not
give assent, he said, replying to their expres-
sion of confidence, that the central purpose of
his life had always been to do God's vnW ; "But
I have not lived as close to Jesus Christ as I
ought to have done." His religion was dis-
tinctly Christian. Though his studies had been
all these years in the Old Testament, his faith
was in God as revealed in Jesus Christ. He
died as he had lived, not simply a religious
man, but a Christian. This he had been for
thirty years at least, this he was pre-eminently
in his last hours.

He laid great stress in his later thought upon
the church. To him it was not enough that one
should live an isolated Christian life. He be-

UNIVEBHITY RECORD

lieved not only in Christ, but in institutional
Christianity. He expressed strongly his convic-
tion that men of religious purpose should go
into the church and take active part in its work
and life. In his childhood he had been dis-
suaded from his wish to unite with a Christian
church by the advice of his elders. In his
early manhood he had taken the step which
previously he had wished to take, and after
thirty years of singularly rich and broad exper-
ience, study of the Bible, and knowledge of men
and life, he emphasized even more strongly
than formerly the need of the church, and the
duty of Christian men to connect themselves
with it and contribute to its progress.

In his last days he sought not only to gain
clear thought for himself, but also to impart
this thought helpfully to others. But this was
by no means new. All his days he had been a
teacher in spirit and in practice. He had learned
that he might impart, he had gained that he
might give. He persisted in teaching so long as
it was possible for him to reach his classroom.
On the Sunday preceding the Convocation Day
above referred to, he taught his Sunday morn-
ing bible class at the University, and added to
the series of difficult tasks in the week follow-
ing the meeting of his regular class on the day
before his last Convocation. And when at
length, confined by the relentless progress of his
disease to his bed, wrestling himself with prob-
lems of religion, he gathered about that bed his
family and friends to give to them each new
thought and conviction that he had gained in
his hours of quiet reflection.

Remarkably free throughout his life from
self-seeking, he was to the last characteristically
self-forgetful.

In his last days his thoughts turned to the life
beyond. In previous years he had given much
study to the subject of conceptions of the future
life among ancient peoples, and especially in
the Bible. The life after death was the subject
of his last classroom instruction, and in the
hours of his last illness the question took on for
him a new personal significance. But character-
istically the thing for which he longed was not
rest, but work. Calling four of his friends of
many years about his bed less than two weeks
before he died, he asked them to pray with him,
adding, "Let us not be formal, let us be simple."
And when each of them had prayed briefly, he
also offered a prayer in words of utter sim-
plicity and childlike yet masculine faith.
Among the sentences of that prayer was this :
"And may there be for me a life beyond this life,
and in that life may there be work to do, tasks
to accomplish." And he closed the prayer with
the words, "And this I ask in the name of
Jesus Christ." The prayer of his last days
was the prayer of his life — more work to do,
tasks still to accomplish.

Amid all the diversity of his life's tasks that
life itself was one of unit)' and continuit}'.
These final expressions, cherished by his friends
as a precious heritage, were but the blossoming
forth at the last of what had been present
throughout all the years.

UNIVERSITY RECORD

WILLIAM RAINEY HARPER, BIOGRAPHICAL '

BY FRANCIS WAYLAND SHEPARDSON

Dean of the Senior Colleges

William Rainey Harper was born in New three years, pursuing

Concord, Muskingum County, Ohio, July 26,
1856, son of Samuel and Ellen Elizabeth
(Rainey) Harper. He was the great grandson
of Robert Harper, who came from Ireland with
his wife, Janet, in 1795, and settled among the
Scotch-Irish people of Western Pennsylvania,
from which place his son Samuel removed to
a farm two miles north of New Concord, Ohio,
where the family made its home about 1848,
when Samuel, the grandson and father of Pres-
ident Harper, settled in the village near by.
The Rainey family also came from Ireland, at
first locating in New York, but later making a
home in Cambridge, Ohio, not far from New
Concord. From this strong Scotch-Irish stock
President Harper received his natural equip-
ment.

His education was begun in Muskingum Col-
lege, the United Presbyterian school in his na-
tive place, when he was eight years old. The
curriculum then covered six years, two of them
preparatory and the usual four collegiate. He
pursued his studies without intermission until
1870, when, at the age of fourteen, he was
graduated with the degree of Bachelor of Arts.
As the college primarily was a school of prepa-
ration for those who intended to enter the min-
istry of the United Presbyterian Church, the
study of the Bible in Hebrew as well as in the
English was a prominent feature of the work.
The proficiency of the useful student in the
former was so marked that, when he was grad-
uated, he delivered his oration in Hebrew, and
the work in the Bible while in colbje probably
had more to do with the shaping of his life than
he or his friends imagfined at the time.

After graduation he remained at home for

' Reprinted from the Standard of January 20, 1906.

favorite studies, and
then, in the autumn of 1873, he entered Yale
University, where he became an earnest stu-
dent of philology under Prof. William Dwight
Whitney, an instructor for whom he always
cherished great respect. Completing this pe-
riod of graduate study, he received the degree
of doctor of philosophy in 1875, being then
nineteen years old. Soon after he married Miss
Ellen Paul, daughter of Rev. David Paul, D. D.,
the president of Muskingum College, and then
became principal of the Masonic College in Ma-
con, Tenn. The next year he was called to be-
come a tutor in the preparatory department of
Dcnison University at Granville, Ohio.

The acceptance of this position at Granville
was an epoch-making event in his life. He
found himself an officer under the wonderfully
inspiring leadership of the president of Denison,
E. Benjamin Andrews. He found a small group
of earnest and devoted instructors, anxious
alike for the intellectual and the spiritual uplift
of their equally earnest students. He examined
carefully the principles of the Baptist faith and
became a member of the Baptist church in Gran-
ville. In the class room he proved an excellent
drill-master, enlisting the interest of his students
in a marked degree, and arousing their ambi-
tions in such a way as to secure great results,
both in the quantity of work done and in the
thoroughness in matters of detail. The zeal dis-
played by him, with this attendant enthusiasm
among the students, led to his selection as prin-
cipal of the preparatory department, which he
had set apart from the college proper under the
name, Granville Academy. President Andrews
and he worked together in harmony, devising
new methods and securing results from their
students which made every student of either, a

UNIVERSITY RECORD

lifelong friend. It was a matter of deepest re-
gret to every one in Granville that a higher
work called him away, when, in 1879, O" ^^
recommendation of President Andrews, he be-
came professor of Hebrew and cognate lan-
guages in the Baptist Union Theological Sem-
inary at Morgan Park, 111.

At this time two educational notions seem
to have been firmly rooted in his mind ; one
the belief in the value of the inductive method
of teaching languages, and the other a determi-
nation to awaken fresh interest in the study of
Hebrew by means of instruction by corres-
pondence methods. With great vigor he de-
voted himself to these ideas, planning and be-
coming the joint author of an extended series
of Latin, Greek, and English textbooks on the
inductive plan, at the same time publishing a
series of text-books in Hebrew, organizing He-
brew correspondence methods and Hebrew sum-
mer schools, and editing a periodical called the
Hebrew Student. To awaken interest in a dead
language like Hebrew was no easy task, and
there was required an expenditure of large
sums of money in the printing and circulation
of literature connected with the work. The
needed funds were secured at great personal
sacrifice, many an outlay for personal grati-
fication being denied for the sake of advancing
the interests of the cause to which he had given
his heart.

He enlisted the co-operation of many who
contributed money in small and large amounts,
and who also suggested to him that there
were many other thoughtful persons who
would encourage any plan for the more sys-
tematic study of the Bible. The result was a
broadening of the scope of the Hebrew Cor-
respondence School by the organization of the
American Institute of Hebrew, this again being
succeeded by the American Institute of Sacred
Literature, which, perhaps, more than any other
single agency, has had influence in extending a

knowledge of the Bible, and the experience of
which laid the foundations broad and deep for
the Religious Education Association. For years
Dr. Harper carried on the work of promulga-
tion, not alone through the correspondence
schools and the Hebrew Student, but also by
means of Bible lectures, delivered in various
parts of the country, which made his name
familiar to all those specially interested in Bible
study. While teaching at Morgan Park he
gave inspiration to many students, who were
stirred by his earnestness, aroused by his tire-
less energy, and encouraged by his friendly
spirit.

The natural outcome of the interest in home
study under direction and in summer schools
was his connection with the Chautauqua System.
In 1885 he was made principal of the Chautau-
qua College of Liberal Arts and six years later
principal of the entire system, maintaining this
relationship until 1898. The year after beginning
the Chautauqua work he received and accepted
a call to become professor of the Semitic lan-
guages in Yale University. In this wider field he
again stirred his students to great enthusiasm,
and by means of his public lectures in New Ha-
ven, New York, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis
and other large cities, and at Vassar, Wellesley"
and other colleges awakened widespread interest
in Bible study. In 1889 he had the great dis-
tinction of being elected by the authorities of
Yale to the Woolsey Professorship of Biblical
Literature, thus holding two full professorships
in the institution at the same time.

Before this time, however, he perhaps had
received intimation that the great work of his
life was to be done in Chicago, for, in the
autumn of 1888, Mr. John D. Rockefeller sought
opportunities of conference with him regarding
the establishment of an institution of learning
in this city to replace on surer foundations
the earlier university which had closed its doors
in 1886. The outcome of these conferences was

UNIVERSITY RECORD

Mr. Rockefeller's declaration in November,
1888: "I am prepared to say that I am ready
to put several hundred thousand dollars into an
institution in Chicago." The next two years
were filled with work for the new institution.
In everything that was done Dr. Harper was
prominent. He was one of the committee of
nine men who reported upon the scope the new
school should assume. He was a constituent
member of the board of trustees under the
charter of the University, dated June 18, 1890.
On September 16, 1890, at the same meeting of
the board which heard Mr. Rockefeller's letter
read announcing a second gift of $1,000,000 to
supplement the former pledge of $600,000, Dr.
Harper was unanimously and enthusiastically
elected president of the University of Chicago.
In February following he accepted the position
and promised to begin his active duties on July
I, 1891.

The history of the institution since that date
is largely the biography of President Harper.
Every building bears his imprint, every detail
of educational policy has been worked out under
his watchful eye, every instructor has received
appointment upon his recommendation ; the Uni-
versity is his lasting memorial. It is too early
to attempt final estimate of President Harper's
work in connection with the institution, but it
is interesting to note how earlier experiences
influenced him in the organization of the Uni-
versity. It is instructive to see how his life
culminated here. It is helpful to observe how
the hand of God seems to have led him to Bible
study in the little church college of his boyhood,
to Yale to gain inspiration from a great spe-
cialist, to Granville to find connection with the
Baptist denomination and the friendship and en-
couragement of President Andrews, to Morgan
Park for a wider outlook and for association
with Dr. Northrup and his able helpers, to the
Chautauqua connection with its thousands of
members, and then back to Yale for the ma-

turer acquaintance with university work which
should prepare him for his task of the near
future.

One of the features of the new University of
Chicago was the University Extension Division
whose three-fold plan of instruction by means
of lecture-studies, by class-studies, in after-
noon and evening, and by correspondence-stud-
ies, was in large measure only the development
of previously accepted ideas, thoroughly tried
by him, and in whose efficiency he firmly be-
lieved. In like manner the Hebrew Student,
which diflferentiated itself in time into Hebraica,
a journal given more strictly to the linguistic
side, and into the Old Testament Student,
which dealt with the literary element, may
have suggested the publication in connection
with the University of a series of journals, each
devoted to a special department and designed
to furnish fresh contributions to a particular
branch of investigation. Among the first of
these was the Biblical World, showing in its
new name the widening scope of the work, and
serving as a type of many such expansions
which came to President Harper as the Univer-
sity grew in wealth, in schools and colleges,
and in power.

During the fourteen years of intense ac-
tivity in connection with the development and
growth of the University, President Harper
made his influence felt in many outside chan-
nels. In Chautauqua circles, as a member of
the Board of Education of Chicago, as a prime
mover and first secretary of the Association of
American Universities, as one of the inner group
of the National Education Association, as the
practical founder of the Religious Education
Association, as adviser in connection with the
establishment of Lewis Institute in Chicago
and the Bradley Polytechnic Institution in
Peoria, as a member of several of the promi-
nent clubs of this city, as superintendent and
chief inspiration of the Hyde Park Baptist Sun-

LWIVERSITY RECORD

7ff

day school — in a thousand ways he shared the
busy life of the age, and gave what of good he
could for the uplifting of his fellow men.

In the University he always taught more
classes than the ordinary rules suggested, and
it was one of the trials of his life that his ad-
ministrative duties so often interfered with his
class-room work, and especially that men should
think of him primarily as an administrator in-
stead of as a scholar and teacher. It therefore
was peculiarly gratifying to him, when some
book came from the press which revealed the
scholarly work he had been doing even when
burdened with the heaviest administrative de-
mands upon his time and strength. Forced by
the position he held to give much time to pub-
lic functions, he loved his personal friends and
was never happier than when in the midst of
his own family. A tireless worker himself he
trained a corps of assistants who gained in-

spiration from him and tried to help him in
the realization of his ideals for the University.
No greater testimonial could be his than the
manifest spirit of loyalty to his ideas that pre-
vails among the University Faculty and in the
student body.

A wonderfully magnetic and inspiring teach-
er, a trained scholar and specialist, a masterful
administrator, a patriotic and active citizen,
a man of warm personal friendships, a loving'
husband and father, a hero of industry. Presi-
dent Harper filled full the record of his less
than fifty years of life. It is hard to realize
that he is dead. It is certain that though he
is dead his spirit will be felt for years in the
lives of those he has influenced, in the ideas and
ideals he has cherished and inculcated, in the
great university which for ages "beneath the
hope-filled western skies" will tell of his suc-
cessful labors for the good of humanity.

UNIVERSITY RECORD

PRESIDENT HARPER AS ADMINISTRATOR'

BY NATHANIEL BUTLER

Dean of the College of Education

In the early days of the University, Dr. Har-
per told me that he resolutely withstood every
temptation to consult catalogues and descrip-
tive circulars of other institutions in forming
his plans for the new university. He did this
merely that he might keep his mind open for
the best things that could be devised, that the
new institution might fulfil its peculiar mission.
This is an illustration of the method of the man
in all his work. Whether in matters pedagogi-
cal or administrative, he followed the method
of induction. He sought to look steadily at all
the conditions involved in his problem, not for
the purpose of asking first of all what others in
similar situations had done, but to see first of all
what was true, suitable, fitting to the case in
hand. On the administrative side he was, there-
fore, infinitely more than a mere executive. He
not only had wonderful power to bring things
to pass, but his very life was in devising, creat-
ing, and organizing. The expression so fre-
quently heard in the last few days that the Uni-
versity itself will be Dr. Harper's great and
everlasting monument, can be rightly under-
stood only in the light of a knowledge of this
trait.

Without doubt Dr. Harper is best known, and
will always be best known to the world at large,
as an administrator. Probably there are not in
the world ten men who are his equals in this
respect. Neverthless, the assertion that his
memory will be preserved chiefly by this awak-
ens in those who knew him best a sort of resent-
ment. To us it seems to leave out of account
the greatest and most essential qualities of the
man, qualities without which he could not have
been the great administrator that he was. No
man could achieve what he did merely by skill

'Reprinted from the Standard of January 20, igo6.

as an organizer and as an executive in the ordi-
nary sense. "We will do whatever the Presi-
dent asks," has been a familiar phrase on the
university quadrangles, not because the Uni-
versity has been presided over by an autocrat,
but because it has had at its head a man who
invariably inspired profound affection and en-
tire confidence. The secret of Dr. Harper's
greatness and power is to be found in the
"personality" of the man, in those traits that
inspire absolute and grateful loyalty. He was
without doubt a great man. great as a scholar,
as a teacher, and as an organizer. But he was
great as an organizer because he put into that
work those qualities of marvelous insight,
personal and contagious inspiration, and un-
failing kindliness, which won for him the de-
voted service of all about him.

All this is meant when it is said by any one
who knew Dr. Harper that he will be remem-
bered chiefly because of his genius as an admin-
istrator. Of him the word genius may be ad-
visedly used. He had the extraordinary in-
sight, that invariable mark of genius, which
made him fertile in resources, for devising
either some new and better way of doing what
had been done before, or some newer and better
thing than had ever been done before. He was,
as I have already said, an innovator, but never
for the mere sake of innovation. What he pro-
posed always justified itself, and although at
the beginning of the University the new schemes
were projected with almost bewildering rapid-
ity, the surprise of their newness and their
rapidity was lost in admiration at the harmony
with which they worked together for good.
Dr. Harper's organization and administration
was his very own.

By a sort of natural selection Dr. Harper

UNIVERSITY RECORD

from the beginning of his career selected fields
of activity that seem especially to have devel-
oped his qualities as a leader. As principal of
an academy, at Granville, Ohio, as professor of
Hebrew and Old Testament exegesis in the
seminary at Morgan Park, as organizer of the
American Institute of Hebrev^^, as principal of
the Chautauqua College of Liberal Arts, as pro-
fessor of Semitic languages and biblical litera-
ture at Yale University, he exhibited on the one
hand his rare abilites as a scholar and as a
teacher, and on the other his genius as an or-
ganizer. In 1890 he took up the task of organ-
izing the University of Chicago, having served
his apprenticeship and bringing from his ex-
perience the fullness of power which made pos-
sible the results with which all the world is
familiar.

It would not be appropriate to undertake a
minute analysis of the illustrations of his ad-
ministrative ability as shown in the organiza-
tion of the University of Chicago. Two or
three examples of it are, however, pertinent.

Among the provisions which his insight
showed him to be necessary in order to meet
more completely than heretofore the need of the
people for higher education, was that of the
extension of teaching beyond the university
premises. The idea of university extension did
not originate with President Harper, but he
saw, as no one else had seen, its possibilities
for American students and communities, and he
reorganized this form of teaching accordingly.
University instruction was given to classes
formed in various parts of Chicago; lecture
courses by university men were made possible
in any locality desiring them; correspondence
instruction in a great variety of university sub-
jects was promised. As a matter of fact, the
class organizations have developed into the
University College in the heart of the city. The
lecture courses have been given in closely
neighboring centers, literally from the Atlantic

to the Pacific, and members of the University
Faculties, through correspondence, are instruct-
ing students in every part of the world, in sub-
jects ranging from oriental literature and phil-
osophy to manual training. The organization
of this work as effected by Dr. Harper has
given the University of Chicago a wholly
unique position among the universities of the
world.

The President was quick to perceive another
opportunity for rendering a larger service to
students in the organization of continuous ses-
sions. It was announced that the University
would offer its courses in full throughout the
entire year. This has been a great boon to
young men and women. A few weeks more or
less are frequently of vital significance to a
student. The opportunity to take up courses of
study at the beginning of any quarter and of
continuing, if need be, during four quarters of a
year, has saved to many young men and women
needed money and priceless time, and has de-
termined in their favor the securing of import-
ant positions in life. The summer quarter has
been of incalculable benefit to literally thou-
sands of students and teachers. In the continu-
ous sessions, and in the summer quarter. Dr.
Harper led the way, and many of the strongest
and oldest universities in the country have, so
far as they could, followed in his steps.

It was inevitable that Dr. Harper should
never be satisfied until the University was so
organized as to present a continuous and closely
compacted educational system from the begin-
ning to the end. As in other instances, so here,
he at once combined with the insight of genius
the ability to realize his conception. Ready to
his hand were the Chicago Institute, under
Colonel Francis W. Parker ; the University
Laboratory School, under Dr. John Dewey ; the
Chicago Manual Training School, conducted
by Dr. Henry H. Belfield, and the South Side
Academy, under Principal William B. Owen.

UJSriVJSBSITY RECORD

There, also, was the royal generosity of Mrs.
Emmons Blaine. Out of these elements Dr.
Harper created a great School of Education,
one of the two higher institutions of this
country for the professional training of ele-
mentary and secondary school teachers. With
the incorporation of this school into the uni-
versity system it is possible for a child to enter
its school as a member of the kindergarten and,
without ever leaving its classrooms, to pursue
his course until he receives the degree of doctor
of philosophy.

Continually one comes back to this phrase,
"Dr. Harper was a great man." Not only are
we saying this now that he is gone, but we
have said it at any time during the last ten
years. He was great because he brought benef-
icent things to pass. Mere genius sees vis-
ions and dreams dreams. The great man adds
to the "vision" the "faculty divine" of expres-
sion, utterance, and execution. Dr. Harper
was pre-eminently a creative administrator of
clear ideas and splendid courage.

We know nothing of the details of the fu-
ture life, but we believe that this universe is

administered upon a wholly reasonable plan.
We cannot doubt that the great abilities of this
man will be brought to bear upon great under-
takings elsewhere. We say of him as Tenny-
son said of Arthur Hallam :

Thy leaf has perish'd in the green,

But somewhere, out of human view,
Whate'er thy hands are set to do
Is wrought with tumult of acclaim.

And as he was here, so we must believe he
will be in spirit and activity there — a great ad-
ministrator,

One who never turned his back but marched breast

forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong

would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better.
Sleep to wake.

No, at noonday, in the bustle of man's work-time
Greet the unseen with a cheer !

Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be,
"Strive and thrive!" Cry "Speed, — fight on, fare ever
There as here !"

univ£:rsitt be cord

PRESIDENT HARPER AS THE CHRISTIAN SCHOLAR '

BY JOHN MERLIN POWIS SMITH

Of the Department of Semitic Languages and Literatures

The great work of President Harper in
originating, organizing, and guiding the growth
of the University of Chicago has so laid hold
of the popular imagination that the fact that
he was a scholar has escaped the minds of niany
people. Yet had he not been a scholar, the
vision of a great university could never have
come to him. It was but the outgrowth of his
passion for scholarly ideals and his determina-
tion to propagate them to the full extent of his
powers. His scholarly qualifications were
widely recognized before he became a univer-
sity president, and the assumption of the great
tasks and reponsibilities connected with that
office did not involve the cessation of his activi-
ties as a productive scholar. Nothing but the
most ardent and unselfish devotion to scholarly
pursuits could have held him fast to his early
ideals in the midst of the turmoil and distraction
of his official life. The place occupied by his
studies during this later period may be learned
from the following sentence from the preface
to his recent commentary on Amos and Hosea:
"But in all these years of administrative con-
cern I have had recourse for change, comfort,
and courage to my work on the Twelve
Prophets."

The tangible evidence of President Harper's
own productive capacity as a scholar is to be
found largely in the columns of Hebraica, a
technical Semitic journal founded by him in
1884, while teaching in the seminary at Morgan
Park, and now published by the University of
Chicago Press as the American Journal of
Semitic Languages and Literatures. His most
important personal contribution to this journal,

^ Reprinted, with slight additions,
Standard of January 20, 1906.

from the

aside from his editoral activity, was a series of
articles on "The Pentateuchal Question" pub-
lished in Vols. V-VH (1888-90). These were in
the form of a discussion with the late Professor
William Henry Green, of Princeton University,
then the greatest representative of the tradi-
tional view of the Old Testament. Dr. Har-
per's articles still remain among the most
exhaustive and powerful presentations of
the evidence for the delimitation of the main
sources in the Pentateuch as they are generally
recognized by the scholarship of today. In
addition to this must be mentioned his Amos
and Hosea (International Critical Commen-
tary) published in March, 1905, together with
its two companion works. The Structure of the
Text of the Book of Amos, and The Structure
of the Text of the Book of Hosea, which ap-
peared about the same time. This commentary
is President Harper's masterpiece, and, with
its two subsidiary studies, represents the best
work of his life. It has received unstinted
praise for its learning in all quarters, and is
unhesitatingly described by the most competent
to judge as standing abreast of the best schol-
arship of the age. It is characterized by its
thoroughly scientific method ; by the abundance
of materials brought to illustrate and elucidate
the text and interpretation ; by the enormous
amount of reading it represents and repro-
duces ; by the familiarity it evinces with all the
best work, ancient and modern, upon these
two prophets ; by the wide range of the subjects
it includes and treats at length; by lucidity of
expression ; by the great analytical power it
shows ; by its true interpretative sympathy ;
and by its independence and soundness of
judgment. The untimely cessation of this work

UNIVERSITY RECORD

upon the Minor Prophets is a grievous loss to
exegetical Hterature.

Not the least important phase of President
Harper's career as a scholar was his ability to
impart his own methods and spirit to his stu-
dents. His enthusiasm was contagious. He
was no mere dry-as-dust delver into the mines
of ancient lore. Contact with his lich and force-
ful personality enkindled in many hearts the
desire to know the truth and to have a share in
bringing other men into the goodly fellowship
of seekers after truth. Many of the leaders
of biblical and Semitic study on this continent
are proud to acknowledge their indebtedness
to him for instruction and guidance. Few
teachers equaled him in the power to inspire
a student to do his utmost. All the strength of
his magnificent mind and the power of his mag-
netic personality were at their best in his work
as teacher, and hopelessly dull and unrespon-
sive must have been the student who failed to
kindle under such instruction.

As a Christian scholar he has greatly en-
riched the religious life of America by helping
to demonstrate that a man may apply the most
rigidly scientific standards of criticism to the
biblical literature and be not one whit the less
a Christian. He has done more than any other
one man to bring the historical method of Bible
study into good repute, both within and outside
of the church. This purpose to popularize the
study of the scriptures found expression in the
establishment of a system of correspondence
study ; in the founding of the Biblical World, a
journal intended for the more intelligent lay-
men and ministers ; in the constant readiness
to deliver public lectures upon biblical subjects;
in his biblical work at Chautauqua ; in a series
of textbooks, known as "Constructive Studies,"
and intended for Sunday schools and academic
classes; in his introduction into the curriculum
of the Divinity School of a large amount of
biblical instruction based upon the English text

rather than the Hebrew ; and in his creative
share in the organization of the Religious Edu-
cation Association. Being by temperament,
inclination, and ability qualified for scholarly
pursuits of the highest order, he deliberately
surrendered his own personal preference in
order that he might in larger measure contrib-
ute to the religious need of the times. .Self-
abnegation of this character was his constant
companion.

Comparatively little time was his even for
the furtherance of the study of the scriptures
by such methods. His official duties were ever
pressing upon him, and were accepted cheer-
fully as part of his destined work for humanity.
Many a time, when he had escaped for a little
while to the seclusion of his own Hbrary, and
we were working together in his favorite field,
he has said: "These hours among my books
are the happiest in my life; just imagine it
being this way all the time!" A statement of
his own feeling upon this point may be quoted
here from a recent letter to a friend :

When I left my work in New Haven to come to
Chicago I was laying greatest emphasis upon the
scholarly side. Up to that time I had given myself
largely to scholarly work. On coming to Chicago
I had to turn aside for the next ten or twelve years
to secure money for the University, and in doing this
I was compelled to throw myself into that side of
the work. The consequence is that Chicago and the
Northwest think of me as a "money-getter," and
that is the reputation I have everywhere — a reputa-
tion which is hardly fair in view of my antipathy
for this kind of work and my love for the other.
. . . .The thing that troubles me is that I seem to stand
in the West for something which I do not really
represent, and the thing which I represent is not ap-
preciated or understood or even known by the great
majority of the people who are familiar with the
working of the University.

Here is a man whose exceptionally philo-
sophic type of mind on the one hand, and
marvelous capacity for minute and detailed
investigation on the other, coupled with almost

UNIVERSITY RECORD

boundless energy and supreme devotion,
might have made him the acknowledged leader
of the scholars of his own department in his
own generation, deliberately abandoning this
high honor when it was already within sight,
in order that he might minister the more di-
rectly and widely to the men of his time.

I would fain speak of many other character-
istics of this great scholar, such as his desire

for truth and hatred of shams, his interest in
men rather than things, and his catholicity of
spirit; but I must content myself with the sim-
ple but heartfelt acknowledgement of my own
inestimable indebtedness to him for the impart-
ation of higher and broader ideals of scholar-
ship and of life. No influence can surpass in
value that which comes through daily contact
with the life of a great man.